I enjoyed your article and just wanted to let everyone know that they can buy a book called Digging It, How to garden your way out of the recession for $8.95 at diggingit.com. The book is based on the concept of the Victory Gardens of the 1940's and covers everything a beginner gardener, urban or otherwise, needs to know to have a great garden, from preparing the soil to choosing, planting, caring for and harvesting vegetables. There's even sections on herbs and food preservation. Check it out and keep gardening!

Bunny Henderson

This green affirming piece ends with the author using a mentally ill neighbor to color her landscape.

Symptoms are his daily hell, not entertainment. It stuns me that social conscience dissolves so regarding metal illness.

If illness had not derailed this man's life, perhaps he too would have been a professional with a family and concerns about his carbon footprint. Someday there might be adequate treatments for severe mental illness & those who are tormented will no longer suffer. In the meantime, how about some empathy & respect.

Most of us can be grateful for the degree that our brains work, the torment that we are mostly spared. Protecting & nurturing the vulnerable in our midst is at least as important as tending a garden, & the two can go very well together.

Or buying super big freezers. That limits your organic veggies to growing season, which here (outside Moscow) is short, short, short.

Also, any brags about the bounty of your garden should come with some geography attached. I'd have a hell of a lot more success growing tomatoes and melon if I weren't trying to do it in a very short season. And it is July, midmorning and only 50 degrees out. Yes, this is quite unseasonable, but I'm always dealing with unseasonable weather.

Why? When you begin, you don't know your bugs. When I lived in England, I gave up on the cabbage family. Between the flea beetles, and two types of cabbage caterpillar, the crop was pretty worthless. On the other hand, I had no problems with squash vine borers or tomato or corn ear worms. In Russia, I can't grow spinach (ignore all you hear about spinach not liking the heat, what it hates is long days, and the further north you are, the longer your day. Now, we get only a few hours of dark a day.

What will thrive in a cold rainy year might not do so well in a hot dry summer and vice versa. A variety of crops means hopefully some will thrive.

Another nice thing about growing herbs is that you can harvest exactly as much as you need when you need it -- instead of buying a big bunch of basil or parsley at the supermarket when you only need a few springs, and having the remainder turn into mush in your vegetable drawer.

Well, of course factory-farmed produce is cheaper. That's the whole point. I think we can say a big, "duh," to that one. Of course, factory-farmed produce is, well, blah. You get what you pay for.

Now, I don't live in the city. I live in Upstate New York in what might otherwise be called an exurban home if there was a decent size city around, on a one-acre lot that is considered small by local community standards. Yet our ecological footprint is quite large.

I look at gardening as a way to mitigate this footprint. Yeah, we must drive to our day jobs, no choice. Yeah, that 180 foot driveway requires a big snowblower to keep clear in the winter. Yeah, we use a lawn tractor to keep the grass cut. And yeah, we really do have more than we need. We also plant trees, burn wood pellets to offset our use of heating oil, and we grow a lot of produce. It's something, which is better than nothing.

We're especially proud of our potatoes, which I have heard nobody mention in any of the comments. Potatoes are about the easiest darn things to grow, and they keep over the winter, so you can grow as many as you like, and once you've had fresh, firm homegrown potatoes, you'll wonder how you got along with the store-bought variety all these years.

As a couple of posters have mentioned, the chances of you meeting all your vegetable and fruit needs from a home garden is pretty slim unless you have some major space. On the other hand certain things are not only cheaper if you can grow yor own, like raspberries, but they are just better when you grow them yourself, if you grow them well. In Istanbul where I live even the medium rate store bought tomatoes are better than the average excuse for a tomato one gets in the US, and still they complain. Aside from that, there is comfort in having the varieties you grew up with and satisfaction in it being the fruit of your own labor. So as soon as you get into any neighborhood with people from the countryside, you'll find every possible inch of growing space devoted to tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, and especially in my area where there are lots of people from the Black Sea, kale. If there's no actual land, then there will be big olive tins filled with soil. Food is so much more than just satisfying hunger or nutrition, it's got layers and layers of culture attached after all.

Though I did use to grow some berries and squash sometimes, I was more of an exotic/ornamental gardener for many years. I still do that, and the street markets provide plentiful good vegetables and fruits at a decent price, so for me the biggest incentive to grow my own is that I can grow the things I can't find commercially here. Local tomato varieties that aren't grown commercially but do beautifully here, old heirloom American sweet corn varieties, blue potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash that aren't normally grown here like Kabocha, Rough Vif d'Etampes and Marina di Chioggia, Iranian peppers, rainbow chard, golden berries, even a salmonberry that seems to be doing pretty well so far... And Rhubarb! I've also shared some of these with local folks who like to grow their own. Rainbow chard is a big hit as are the different winter squash. But blue potatoes just weird them out. And I'm not sure I want to inflice habaneros on Turkish cooking. ;)

No doubt if I ever move back Stateside I'll have a garden full of pink tomatoes, "sivri" peppers, delicate thin-walled bell peppers for stuffing, Çengelköy cucumbers, Jerusalem artichokes, garlic for eating green, and favas!