When I heard the title, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden, I knew I had to get this book. As someone who is on the verge of plunging into fairly unknown territory -- vegetable gardening -- I figured this would serve as a useful cautionary tale, as well as being funny. I was somewhat correct on the first count, and definitely correct on the second count!
The author, William Alexander, lives in New York's Hudson Valley in a large 3-acre property in a big old farmhouse that required extensive renovations. When he and his wife decided they wanted a garden, they hired a landscape architect to design it.
As soon as I read that, I began to get an idea of why his tomatoes were going to cost him $64 each. Who in the world hires someone to design a vegetable garden? Actually, I suspect quite a few people do. I'm definitely not one of them.
When I was growing up, my parents had a vegetable garden. It was a fenced in area with plenty of vegetables planted in rows in the dirt. Period. It worked quite well. (Of course, as a teenager, I had no interest at all in the garden and would only reluctantly help my parents maintain it. How things have changed!)
William Alexander, however, didn't want just a patch of dirt with rows of vegetables. He envisioned the garden as being beautiful as well as practical. Thus, the landscape architect, as well as numerous other expenses and aggravations that he incurred over time.
For example, one labor-saving way to keep weeds down is to use black plastic or landscape fabric. However, since he didn't like the appearance, and because he didn't want to be separated from the marvelous soil of the garden, he refused to use it.
The garden he plants is quite large: 20 raised beds (4 feet by 12 feet), plus another thousand square feet for corn, cucumbers, squash, and melons. I hope I'm smart enough not to plant a garden that large!
However, throughout the book he displays plenty of humor about his misadventures and plans gone awry. Here's an excerpt, where he explains the difference between "weeding" and "cultivating":
"Gonna be a lot of weeding," he repeated. I let the handful of sixty-dollar-a-yard topsoil drop back into the bed.
"Cultivating," I said under my breath. "Gonna be a lot of cultivating."
What's the difference?
Well, none really. Except image. As when decades ago my sweaty teenage sister (or was it Blanche DuBois?) declared, "Ah don't sweat; ah perspire." Well, ah don't week; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.
Some of the most useful bits of the book discuss his attempts to keep out deer and groundhogs, as well as his battles against insects, weeds, fungi, etc. He also relates the conflict between his desire to have a completely organic garden and his desire to actually have something left to harvest! I suspect many gardeners go through a similar struggle.
The title of the book refers to a calculation that he made at some point to find out how much each tomato that he had harvested that season had cost him. The cost he comes up with is $64 each. However, don't make the mistake of thinking that amount is typical and let it discourage you from planting a garden! I have to nitpick and point out that there are significant flaws in his calculation. In addition, he incurred large expenses that most gardeners will not face.
For example, because the spot he chose for his garden was on a slope, he had to bring in a professional with some heavy equipment to grade and terrace the ground, at a cost of $8,500! Plus, he valued all of the rest of his produce at standard supermarket prices, leaving $1219 in expenses. He then divided that among the 19 Brandywine tomatoes he got that year (it was an extremely bad harvest that year) and came up with the figure of $64 per tomato.
I could go into great detail, analyzing his accounting method and explaining what's wrong with it, but frankly it would be about as interesting as, well, accounting. So instead I'll just repeat that the average gardener is not going to spend anywhere near $64 each to raise tomatoes, so don't let that scare you off!
Regardless of nitpicks with his accounting, this was a very entertaining book and I recommend it to everyone, even if you doubt you will ever put spade to soil.
What I'm Currently Reading
- Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook, by Jennifer R. Bartley
Waiting in My Queue
- Let It Rot! The Gardener's Guide to Composting, by Stu Campbell
- Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, by Nancy Chioffi & Gretchen Mead
- Illinois Gardener's Guide, by James A. Fizzell
Woo Hoo Wally is blogging again. Do you blog anywhere else? I keep checking your live journal everyday. :-)
Mary
Posted by: Mary | January 08, 2009 at 12:38 PM