PORTLAND, Ore. — There's no question, things have changed at Cornell Farm Nursery in Southwest Portland. Deby Barnhart and her husband own the nursery. It would normally be bustling with customers on a nice sunny day.
But these days, most of the nursery's business is done online or over the phone. And when it comes vegetables, business has been good.
"They're just flying out of here we're making huge orders to try and keep up," said Barnhart. "Everybody's deciding it's time to do something in the garden at home to grow their own food."
In fact, home gardening has become so popular, in the last few weeks an online vegetable gardening course offered by Oregon State University is getting about 1,000 people signing up for it a day.
"It totally exploded beyond anything we had ever dreamed possible," said Signe Danler, who teaches the online course. "Everyone wants to have their own victory garden."
The vegetable gardening course usually costs $45 to take. But the university is waiving that fee through at least the end of April.
As a result, the course, which had about 15 registered students three weeks ago, now has so many signing up that it crashed the system one day.
"We're a little over two weeks into it now and we now have almost 24,000 people registered for the course," said Danler.
With more signing up every day.