It’s been a heck of a growing season so far.

I’m not a gardener and I don’t play one on TV. (If I could play one in a video game I might give it a whirl, particularly if my plants had a tendency to uproot themselves and come after me brandishing hideous green lianas covered in razor-sharp thorns. Ooo oo, and rocket launchers.) My favorite landscaping foliage is concrete, my favorite piece of lawn art is a gas grill. Nature Boy I am not. Fortunately, Margaret is, and she takes full advantage of the scary-huge garden space that came with our place.

This year has been exceptional. The brutally hot kick-off to Summer may have had something to do with it, but our plants—particularly the tomatoes and the sunflowers—have been growing like gangbusters.

Our sunflowers are usually this stately, but not this early. I can’t wait to fail to see the look on Anastatia’s face when she goes out to the garden (she went out to say goodbye to it before she left with her dad on a trip to San Fran—God, what a cute kid) and immediately gets lost in the sunflower forest. Maybe we ought to put a gingerbread house somewhere in the middle. 😛

The tomatoes are another matter. We have never in our lives had tomato plants this tall, this beefy, this, well, frightening.

They suck up their entire—what, two, three gallon?—reservoir of water every damn day. They are tall enough to peek through our bedroom window, and late at night they mutter ominous things about wanting midnight snacks and how if we don’t make with the fish-meal smoothies we’d better sleep with one eye open. These things are huge. I keep wondering what the hell we’re going to do with the plants once Autumn gets here. Firewood, maybe? Anyone looking to build a garden shed or something, see me before you shell out for lumber.

This brings me to my actual reason for writing this post, a book recommendation. If you have any interest whatsoever in gardening or are close to someone who does, I highly recommend The $64 Tomato by Willliam Alexander.

It’s the stirring—okay, not really—account of an IT manager and his physician wife’s efforts to turn their rambling three-acre suburban New York backyard into a proper English-style vegetable garden and orchard. Ya-hoo!

If just about anyone else had written this book, it would be exactly as precious, as prissy and self-absorbed, that is to say as pathetically yuppie as it initially sounds. Oh, the trials and tribulations of having the massive income and copious spare time necessary to hire someone to fully landscape the back yard of your beautifully restored colonial damn-near-mansion! The deer, the webworms, the tomato blossom end-rot! Can’t you just hear the strains of “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen” on the wind as it whispers through the struggling apple trees of the fruit orchard? Pfleh.

But Alexander writes with such dry humor, such warm and self-directed irony, that what could have been a massively masturbatory missive by a member of the misproportionately moneyed menschosphere turns out instead to be quite charming and absorbing. His epic battles with the wily apple maggot, an insanely clever groundhog he dubs Superchuck, and the physical toll that being a “gentleman farmer” takes on his middle-aged information-technology-crafted body are engaging and fun to read. You really feel for him, particularly because he is so obviously aware that he has brought it all on himself.

This book is a great afternoon read, just perfect for a sunny day when you are trying to find something to do to avoid going out and weeding the bean patch. 😉