Betty Lui wakes up at 6 a.m. to water her plants before heading to her job at a Manhattan public relations agency. Her Williamsburg apartment window and rooftop deck are packed with them, a private stretch of green in a city built mostly out of concrete, and she credits the whole operation with keeping her steady. She is one of a growing number of young New Yorkers turning apartments, balconies and rooftops into gardens, a shift HarlemView documented in a recent feature on Gen Z and millennial gardeners.
Lui started during the pandemic, in a 380-square-foot apartment. “I was living in a 380 sq ft apartment during the pandemic and plants were my one joy to escape during that terrible time,” she said. The draw, for her and a lot of her generation, is two things at once: something that calms the nervous system, and a small way to live with less waste.
The scale is real. A survey of 6,152 city residents across New York, Los Angeles and Newark, published in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, found that 35 percent of New York City participants grow at least some of their own produce, most of them indoors or in a home yard rather than in a community garden.
Younger people are a big slice of that. GardenPals, a gardening-information site, puts millennials at 29 percent of US gardener demographics, and the National Gardening Association data it compiles shows garden centers logged a 65 percent jump in millennial customers and a 44 percent jump in Gen Z customers between 2020 and 2021. That same data pegs mental health as the top reason people said they gardened more during the pandemic, cited by 49 percent.
For Lui, part of the appeal is the endless to-do list. “I am in a constant state of potting, repotting, fertilizing, starting seeds, harvesting, planting seedlings, pruning, organizing,” she said. It has also rewired how she shops and what she throws out. “I’m composting much more considering where bagged soil comes from and I think about all of the packaging we throw away when we buy groceries,” she said.
It is not all serene. When summer heat sets in, Lui waters hundreds of plants and tries to track each one’s needs, and the maintenance can still get away from her. “Things falling over and plants dying is also a bummer but it’s all part of life,” she said.
Sophia Mirb, who gardens in Manhattan, said the workload and the cost catch people off guard. “Indoors usually need once a week watering and the outdoors more like daily or every other day,” she said. Then come the fertilizers, seeds, compost and tools. “I think people underestimate just how complex it is and how much goes into it like time, money, care and thought,” she said.
Apps and social media are doing a lot of the teaching. SimpleSpring, in its own survey, found 56 percent of respondents use mobile apps for their gardening, replacing the fat reference books an older generation leaned on. Lui credits TikTok with connecting gardeners across cities and dismantling the idea that this is an old person’s hobby. “The community on TikTok is amazing and the fact that all of these strangers are supportive of your hobby, even more than our real life friends and family. It’s a great place for gardeners,” she said.
The Frontiers study came with a caveat. It found household gardening in New York skewed toward higher-income, white and male residents, and that homeownership was the single strongest predictor of whether someone gardened at all. The authors concluded that urban agriculture, as it currently works, looks closer to an elite hobby than a tool that reaches the city’s most underserved residents.
Featured image: Courtesy gardenpals.com
