The home garden is a unique human-nature interspace that accommodates a diverse spectrum of plant species and provides multiple services to households. One of the most important roles of home gardens is to shelter the agricultural plant diversity that provides for diverse and healthy nutrition, especially in rural communities.
1. Introduction
Through the ages, humans have invested considerable efforts and resources to construct and maintain a favorable environment for growing and breeding crops and ornamental species so as to foster a diverse spectrum of provisions and services delivered by plants
[1,2,3][1][2][3]. As a result, one of the closest spaces of plant–human interaction–the home garden–is seen as a multifunctional and multilayered land-use system that provides not only for production of food and fodder, ornamentals, medicines, fuel, etc., but also for human cultural and spiritual well-being
[4,5][4][5]. Depending on the climate, geographical region, cultural and economic background of their keepers, home gardens differ in their structure, natural diversity and purpose
[1,6,7][1][6][7]. Private gardens in the tropical zones have been more frequently discussed in their current relation to self-provisioning, presenting an important part of the livelihoods of economically struggling communities
[8,9,10,11,12][8][9][10][11][12]. A broad variety of plants used as food are reported in a number of studies dedicated to the past and present of the cultivation of edible species in European home gardens
[13,14,15,16,17][13][14][15][16][17]. However, being largely supplanted by the globalized agri-food industry, temperate and especially European home gardens and their owners have drawn less attention
[5,16][5][16]. Since the beginning of the new Millennium, European home gardens have presented a colorful spectrum in East–West direction. In Western and Central Europe, they have been mostly appreciated for their cultural value, harboring mainly ornamentals and fruit trees, while to the east they have ensured staple food and/or fruits and vegetables for their owners and in some cases also for the market
[7,18,19][7][18][19]. Important topics for researchers of European home gardens have also been the loss of agricultural diversity, preservation of biocultural heritage and the role of gardening in the distribution of invasive plant species
[5,17,20,21,22,23][5][17][20][21][22][23]. However, with the bloom of urban gardening, activated by sustainability objectives and more recently by the food import shortages imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a growing body of evidence showing that (home) gardening in the industrialized societies (namely in Continental Europe, Britain and North America) is a vital activity that could not only alleviate family/local food insecurity but also contribute to the mental health and subjective wellbeing of those involved in it
[8,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31][8][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].
In Eastern and Central European countries, and especially in their rural regions, where substantial socio-economic and agricultural landscape transformations have been evident since the abolishment of Communism, the fate and development of home and allotment gardens as a food source were considerably different compared to their western counterparts
[32,33][32][33]. Through the years, different studies have related subsistence farming in Eastern Europe with the overcoming of economic challenges to the poor communities in these countries
[34]. However, recent data have shown that the meanings that underpin self-provisioning by growers of allotment gardens from Central and West Europe were quite similar
[35,36][35][36]. Nevertheless, it has also been shown that for East Europeans, food growing is not only a simple means of food supply but also a complex culture-related activity that needs additional research
[37].
Subsistence farming was a primary livelihood in Bulgaria until the collectivization of farm land after the end of World War II
[38]. As a result, home gardens, and later, allotments granted to the urban population, remained the main places where Bulgarians could freely operate as farmers during Communism. The popularity of subsistence farming in countries of the former Eastern Bloc at the beginning of the 1990s was negatively correlated with the percentage of the population employed in the agriculture sector, with Bulgarians placing food growing for personal use among the main activities that supported their overall living standard
[39]. A recent study has shown that in several peri-urban villages around Sofia (the capital of Bulgaria), vegetable gardens and greenhouses were found in 31–71% of the examined yards, while flower beds and lawns were less frequent (15–53%), depending on the terrain, planning and individual preference of the owners
[40].
2. Characterization of Home Gardens and Their Owners
The characteristics of the studied home gardens and their owners are shown in
Table 1. Home gardens sized over 100 square meters prevailed in both lowland (≤300 m above sea level, coded hereafter with LL) and semi-mountainous and mountainous settlements (>300 m a.s.l., coded hereafter with SMM), at 93.8% and 57.6%, respectively. The number of smaller gardens was higher in SMM settlements, where yards of less than 100 square meters were frequently found due to the elevated terrain (
p-value < 0.01).
Table 1. Characteristics of the studied home gardens and owners.
|
Frequencies | 1 |
p | -Values | 2 |
Total |
LL |
SMM |
|
Total N of home gardens |
65 |
32 |
33 |
|
Home garden size (square meters) |
|
|
|
|
Over 500; N (%) |
27 (41.5) |
18 (56.3) |
9 (27.3) |
<0.01 |
100–500; N (%) |
22 (33.8) |
12 (37.5) |
10 (30.3) |
NS |
50–100; N (%) |
10 (15.4) |
2 (6.3) |
8 (24.2) |
<0.01 |
Under 50 (sq. m) N (%) |
6 (9.2) |
0 (0.0) |
6 (9.2) |
<0.01 |
Food growing area (FGA); fraction of garden size |
|
|
|
|
Under 1/3; N (%) |
1 (1.5) |
0 (0.0) |
1 (3.0) |
raw (salads) |
|
98.5 |
Solanum tuberosum | L. |
cooked or roasted |
|
80.0 |
Vitis vinifera | L. |
fresh, preserves, raisins, vinegar, spirits |
D, P, F |
80.0 |
Malus domestica | Borkh. |
raw or cooked, preserves, vinegar, pastries, spirits |
D, P, F |
73.8 |
Mentha spicata | L. |
flavoring for various dishes, pastries |
D, FR |
72.3 |
Lactuca sativa | var. | longifolia | (Lam.) Alef. |
raw (salads), pastries |
|
69.2 |
Phaseolus vulgaris | L. |
cooked |
D |
67.7 |
Lactuca sativa | var. | crispa | (L.) Schübl. & G. Martens |
raw (salads) |
|
61.5 |
Prunus avium | (L.) L. |
fresh, desserts, preserves, spirits |
P |
47.7 |
Rubus idaeus | L. |
fresh, desserts, preserves |
P, FR |
47.7 |
Satureja hortensis | L. |
flavoring for various dishes and cured sausages |
D |
43.1 |
Ficus carica | L. |
fresh, preserves, spirits |
D, P |
41.5 |