Yolanda Burrell is bustling around her farm-supply shop, Pollinate, in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, moving between the nursery garden and the office, where she picks up plant and equipment orders left on her voicemail and computer.

“It’s always our Christmas rush, this time of year, but this year has been crazy, with a lot of new gardeners coming out of the woodwork,” she says. Burrell also sells chicks, and the frenzy for buying them, fueled by coronavirus concerns, was felt.

“I got cleaned out — sometimes by buyers who want to give their kids something to do apart from play Minecraft. I caution them: The chicks need lots of protein, warmth for months, and then when they reach the laying age, this fall, the days’ll be getting darker and they might not give you that many eggs.”

Nurseries like Pollinate have been declared essential businesses, carved out of the state’s mid-March closure order, as have hardware stores, many of which also sell plants. With a tight sales space, for safety reasons Burrell has furloughed her staff; twice a week she offers curbside pickup of orders.

Nationwide, there’s been a boom in urbanites and suburbanites buying chickens, as well as vegetable seeds and seedlings. “I put in an order to my usual seed supplier,” Burrell says, “and a message came back saying they had to deal with their backlog before accepting new orders. But then they said I got in under the wire.”

The push toward making gardens productive is being driven during this time in part by worries about the ongoing integrity of the food system. Those who’ve already seen runs on flour, yeast and rice at their local grocery stores wonder what’ll run out next. This, paired with widespread economic anxiety in this time of furloughs and canceled contracts, has made many rush to grow food in their gardens.

Through her company, Pine House Edible Gardens, Oakland’s Leslie Bennett helps remodel yards into small farms, adding, as necessary, raised beds, beehives and chicken coops, setups that are at once functional and visually appealing. “It’s been busy, from getting people all ready to go to doing video consults with tech executives hiding out in their shelters on the Peninsula, wanting advice on how to raise what they need there.”

There aren’t yet statistics available on seed orders, but many seed retailers from across the country are reporting tenfold increases in their business. “We’ve had massive orders,” says Maya Shiroyama, the owner of the Kitazawa Seed Co. in Oakland. “Sometimes really big orders come in from people who say, in the comments, that they’ve never gardened before.”

Nate Kleinman is a longtime organic farmer based in Pennsylvania who worked for two years in disaster-relief efforts in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. As the New York region gets hit hard by another type of scourge, he has co-founded a nonprofit, the Cooperative Gardens Commission, to foster the growth of what the group is calling Corona Victory Gardens. “In 1½ weeks, we’ve had 1,400 expressions of interest from all across the U.S., including the Bay Area,” he says.

More established gardening nonprofits have also seen a big uptick in interest in edible gardens. The National Gardening Association has seen an explosion of traffic to its website, which has information on gardening during the coronavirus lockdown, and guides for novice gardeners on how to get good yields in their first year. “And the interest we’re getting is not in growing marigolds and zinnias,” executive director Dave Whitinger says. “Our message to new gardeners is: You can do it. Even a small garden can produce lots. Even containers on a balcony, plants on a windowsill.”

Another national nonprofit, the venerable National Garden Bureau, is calling for widespread plantings of what they’re calling Victory Gardens 2.0, in reference to the food gardens the federal government urged Americans to plant on their properties during World War I and World War II. At one point during WWII, Victory Gardens produced about 40 percent of the nation’s produce. In San Francisco, the lawns around City Hall and large portions of Golden Gate Park were converted to vegetable gardens.

Americans’ urge, in tough times, to get ourselves back to the garden runs particularly deep in California. Set near Monterey, John Steinbeck’s 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men,” focuses on two drifters who share a desire, some day, to live off “the fatta the lan’ an’ raise rabbits.” In the 1960s and ’70s, many young people went back to the land, to live and farm communally, often doing so in pastoral parts of California.

There was yet another iteration after the 2008 downturn. Novella Carpenter was one of the standard-bearers of that movement, and her 2009 memoir, “Farm City,” helped set its tone. “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto” is the book’s opening line, riffing on Isak Dinesen’s opener for “Out of Africa,” and it goes on to document her efforts to raise, on a formerly vacant lot in West Oakland, vegetables and fruits, as well as turkeys, ducks, pigs and, yes, rabbits. The daughter of back-to-the-landers, she preferred to do her farming within city limits since, as she writes, “I still regard the country as a place of isolation, full of beauty, but mostly loneliness.” And so she became one of a new breed who called themselves urban farmers.

A teacher who now heads the University of San Francisco’s urban agriculture program, Carpenter says she felt the allure of this life choice fading some in the prolonged economic boom of the last decade — and the high housing costs in the Bay Area meant many couldn’t find the sort of plot that Carpenter did for her farm. “But now,” she says, “there’s an urgency to it. Raising food can keep you out of the grocery stores, which can feel like ‘corona parties.’ I used to tell my students if the apocalypse hits, meet me in the (teaching) garden. We don’t know what’s going to happen, how long this is going to last, but, in the meantime, it can be something to do that feels positive, like a way of taking some portion of control back.”

Another child of back-to-the-landers, Sebastian Ages and his wife recently purchased a small property in Santa Rosa where they are raising black-bellied sheep. “Growing up in Mendocino County, I was a little embarrassed bringing rabbit sandwiches to school, the homemade bread falling apart. But now I’m happy to be passing on some of the things I learned to my daughters.”

The family has been growing brassicas, potatoes, carrots and cauliflower in raised beds sided with lumber harvested on the property. “Our economic security is not a given at this point. And so it feels proactive to be raising food,” Ages says. “In a time of disease, some deaths, it feels good to be bringing up living things.”

Alec Scott is an Oakland freelance writer. Email culture@sfchronicle.com

Resources National Gardening Association’s guide to growing edibles: www.garden.org/covid19 National Garden Bureau’s Victory Garden 2.0 program: www.ngb.org/2020/03/23/victory-garden-2-0 Cooperative Gardens Commission: bit.ly/39z33al Pollinate Garden and Farm Supply: www.pollinatefarm.com Kitazawa Seed Company: www.kitazawaseed.com Pine House Edible Gardens: www.pinehouseediblegardens.com