The start of the Great Recession in 2007 brought on a trend that garden centers hadn’t seen in years — edible gardening. Seeds, vegetable starts and fruit trees became big sellers, while ornamentals cooled off. Four years later, the trend is still going, but will it continue? According to Trey Pitsenberger of the Golden Gecko Garden Center in Garden Valley, Calif., the answer is yes:

My answer is based on where we do business and the economics of our area, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northern California. Right now we have an unemployment rate of 12 percent. With that kind of rate you can well imagine that ornamental plantings are the last thing on people’s minds. Some “well to do” types in The Bay Area and Sacramento may be doing some landscaping, but for all intents and purposes landscaping is dead.

Pittsenberger goes on to talk about what this means for the “outdoor entertaining space,” as well as some possible “new things under the sun” when it comes to edibles. Read the complete post and follow him on Twitter (@pitsenberger) if you would like to be alerted to his new posts (always interesting and worth a read).