For backyard-farmer companies, business is bountiful

Farmscape is an urban farming company located in the Los Angeles area.

Companies are sprouting up across the country, offering help building and maintaining backyard vegetable gardens for those who lack the time — or green thumb — needed to keep the crops coming.

By P.J. Huffstutter
Los Angeles Times
May 2, 2010

Excerpt:

Ignoring his aching back, Todd Lininger squatted down on his knees and inched his way around the vegetable field.

The yields were up on three arugula plants. A snail crawled in the row of lettuce. And it looked like the onions might be ready for that night’s dinner.

All in all, not a bad harvest — considering that these crops were growing in a Lilliputian backyard plot in a Claremont cul-de-sac.

Lininger calls himself a farmer, though he doesn’t ride a John Deere and never sees a sun set over the fields. Instead, he tends a succession of peewee suburban plots as if they were the sprawling ranches of the Central Valley.

Read the rest of the story here.