It all started in 2005 when my husband and I moved to the country in Grass Valley. It was a case of city folk longing to be country folk. So, we developed our little bit of paradise on 5 acres, starting by building
16 ( 4'x8') raised beds—yes, 16 of them! What were we thinking, you ask? We weren't. We were just convinced that lots of raised beds was an essential part of country living. And, we actually did quite well growing all the usual suspects for several years and having a wonderful time doing it. But then we began to wonder how much all of these home-grown delicacies were actually costing us. That's where this month's book comes in.

While we were in the midst of our madcap experiment with veggie gardening “on steroids”, I happened on one of the funniest, most entertaining and astute horticulture books I've read to date—
The $64 Tomato by William Alexander, 2006 (ISBN-13:978-156512-503-2). Mr. Alexander, unlike your innocent reviewer, had been a small-scale farmer for more than a quarter century. But we both had the same delicious dream of having a wonderful vegetable garden in the backyard—or, in our case, in the “back 40”. As the book's subtitle so perfectly sums up, The $64 Tomato: “How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent A Fortune, And Endured An Existential Crisis In The Quest Of The Perfect Garden.”

How many of us are guilty of this same quest? It's just that this “Don Quixote” of the gardening world actually decided to figure out how much financial damage he was doing along the way. When Alexander ran a cost-benefit analysis, adding up everything from the Havahart animal trap ($60 ) to the Velcro tomato wraps ($5 each), then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it came as a huge shock for him to learn that it cost an eye-popping $64 to grow each tomato.

But, it's the adventure-in-growing that makes his book so valuable. For, in this amusing and pointed account, Alexander gives superb advice about everything from leeks to lettuce, while asking such existential questions as, “What do our gardens tell us about ourselves? Do we get the gardens we deserve”? And, why does the groundhog have to take one bite from half a dozen tomatoes when any gardener would gladly give him six bites of just one?” What were his answers to these and other resonating questions? He just kept gardening and growing. And what was our answer to many of the same questions? We moved back to the city!