William Alexander's gardening memoir The $64 Tomato stole my heart the moment I saw the title.  The title is taken from an anecdote at the very end of the book, when Alexander prices out the cost of raising each of his favorite Brandywine tomatoes. 

When I became a first-time chicken owner in the spring of 2009, I started tracking all of my expenses in one column of a spreadsheet, and the number of eggs in another.  At this point, a year and a half later, those eggs are down to costing "only" $1.02 per egg.  Not per dozen: PER EGG. 

I found that most of my costs were infrastructure fees, like lumber and building materials for their mobile coop (called a chicken tractor).  Alexander discovers the same issue, although his costs run to the thousands. 

This hilarious, thoughtful, and brutally honest look at Alexander's new pastime as "gentleman gardener" only serves to strengthen my resolve against gardening.

The book begins with the story about how he and his wife Anne came to own their new home.  His wife, a GP, was opening a medical practice in a small Hudson Valley town.  Rather than commute, they decided to buy a home.  For reasons unknown, Anne falls in love with a house that everyone in town calls "the Big Brown House."

The Big Brown House is notorious, and features in many local stories.  From tales of keggers in its field, to the numerous fires.  Everyone seems to know The Big Brown House, and soon I imagine everyone knows about the gardener and the doctor who live there.

Alexander (who works in software engineering) decides to turn the muddy clay field behind the home into a garden.  He starts with the best of intentions - organic all the way! - and part of the fun of the book is watching how Alexander's best intentions go horribly awry. 

The Hudson Valley is home to hordes of hungry woodchucks and deer.  Alexander's electric fence practically qualifies as a secondary character.  We follow the antics of the fence, from the time it nearly kills an arborist, to the way Superchuck (a particularly formidable woodchuck foe) learns to time his leaps through the fence so as to take advantage of the fact that it zaps ten times a second.  There are (literally) split-second gaps between the fence's zaps, and Superchuck learns how to exploit them.

Not to mention the weeds, the plague of sod webworms, freakish bouts of weather, and poor garden design choices.  The $64 Tomato has it all!

The really interesting thing to me is that, having spent plenty of time talking with gardeners about their gardens, it's clear that Alexander's story isn't terribly unusual.  There's always some calamity, some expensive catastrophe, some crazy late night you spend canning peaches just because the peaches are ripe and you have to. 

The eternal mystery to me is why anyone would bother.  I suppose a lot of people feel the same way about knitting, which I enjoy immensely.  Luckily for me, I can knit instead of garden, and read Alexander's book instead of getting my own hands dirty.