Cultivating Your Garden

My current bedtime reading is a cookbook called Potager by Georgeanne Brennan. It's a gorgeous book, with some of the most mouthwatering photography I've seen in a long time (and I'm one of those freaks who reads cookbooks obsessively for fun) -- pictures not only of the completed recipes, but of market stalls and of small gardens.

Since a potager is a kitchen garden, it's only natural that the book should end with a description of how to grow your own, and for me it felt like a revelation. The four-page how-to actually made me feel like even I, the least competent gardener known to man (I once ran a betting line on how many plants I could kill, you see) could successfully grow a modest yet sumptuous plot. We actually do have herbs and tomatoes in containers, but I feel like they don't really count since herbs grow like weeds and my husband and daughter oversee the tomatoes.

The very first thing I thought of when I read Potager was Leslea's letter to her congressman where she mentioned farming her backyard. So I wondered how many other people are doing similar things because of allergies -- whether because of GMO concerns, issues with allergens or additives in produce waxes and coatings, or even just because your grocery store, like the ones near my house, thinks the produce section is a great place to sell peanuts and tree nuts in the shell. Have your food allergies turned you into (or forced you into being) a gardener?