“It’s reached into the average consumer’s consciousness,” he says.

The retirement of the baby boomer generation also is fueling growth in gardening, says George Ball, president and CEO of W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the largest seed company in North America. Burpee’s sales have been growing at up to 10 percent a year.

“When we face retirement or a slowdown in our lives, one of the time-based activities that is rewarding is gardening,” he says.

Doiron became a convert to home-grown foods while living in Belgium during the 1990s. There he became acquainted with so-called slow food (the antithesis of fast food culture), as well as the French protest against “La Malbouffe,” or bad food.

When he and his family moved in 2001 to the same Maine neighborhood where he’d grown up, Doiron noticed how few backyard gardens there were. He made it his mission to get more people to plant more gardens and prepare the food themselves.

Besides growing a smorgasbord of foods in his yard, Doiron holds neighborhood garden parties and has created an International Kitchen Gardener Day, to be celebrated the fourth Sunday of each August.

His Web site draws about 70,000 unique visitors a month, and his e-mail newsletter goes to 3,200 people in 80 countries.

Though Americans are embracing the organic and local food movements, many still have questions, Doiron says. Should you buy conventional broccoli from a nearby farm, or the organic variety that was grown 1,000 miles away and required hundreds of gallons of fuel to get to your table?

“But there’s no quandary whatsoever with food from your own backyard,” he says.

If that’s not enough to persuade people to plant a garden, then the cost savings might be. Last year, Doiron got one to two months worth of lettuce from a $3 packet of seeds.

“We went five months without buying a vegetable, and we ate like royalty,” he says.

And a new study out of St. Louis University suggests that young children in rural areas eat more fruits and vegetables when the produce is homegrown, and that garden-fed children prefer the taste of fruits and vegetables to other foods.

During World War II, some 20 million people answered the call to plant their own gardens in the name of patriotism.

This time, Doiron says, the issue is about feeding the world, which is expected to grow from 6.5 billion to 9 billion people by 2045.

“It’s all meant to be working toward the goal of sustainability, which we have to be working toward if we’re going to feed 9 billion people nutritiously in the next 40 years or so,” he said.