New Book Takes the Scary Out of Gardening: Turns Out Growing Your Own Food Is Really Easy

As NASA reported in 2005, lawns now constitute "the single largest irrigated crop in America," taking up at least three times the acreage we devote to irrigated corn. Has any nation in the history of mankind ever squandered so many resources to cultivate so much vegetation of such dubious value?

Meanwhile, we currently grow less than 2 percent of our own food.

"This," Michele Owens declares in her just-published Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, "is not yet enough of a revolution to satisfy me."

Owens, who cofounded and contributes regularly to the uber-popular, highly respected GardenRant blog, is a self-taught amateur gardener. And that may be why her book is one of the best manifesto/memoirs so far this century on growing your own veggies.

With nearly two decades of experience under her own backyard greenbelt, Owens makes the case that the simple act of growing food is just that -- simple. "Years of vegetable gardening have turned me into a complete minimalist who uses nothing besides shovel, seeds and mulch."

Finally, a Bittman for the backyard! Owens also manages to distill the essence of vegetable gardening into a breezy precept that carries just a whiff of Owed de Pollan: "...give your crops lots of sun, fertile soil, and sufficient water."

Of course, this kind of admirably concise advice is so simple, Owens admits, that it's "hardly enough to fill a page or two, let alone a book."

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