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
Product Description
William Alexander had a simple dream of having a vegetable garden and small orchard in his backyard. It was a dream that would lead to life-and-death battles with groundhogs, webworms, and weeds; midnight expeditions in the dead of winter to dig up fresh thyme; skirmishes with neighbors who feed the vermin (i.e., deer); the near electrocution of the tree man; and the pity of his wife and children.
When Alexander decided to run a cost-benefit analysis, adding up everything from the Havahart animal trap ($60) to the Velcro tomato wraps ($5) to the steel edging ($1,200), then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it came as quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each tomato.
A gardener with an existential bent, Alexander gives excellent advice about everything from peaches to leeks, while tackling such questions as What do our gardens tell us about ourselves? Do we get the gardens we deserve? And why does the g… More >>
Working all day at a nearby research institute, sometimes Bill Alexander would have to gird his loins when he came home at sundown and still had all his gardening to do. He and his physician wife owned a patch of land neighboring boys used as a baseball field, but Alexander always had weekend dreams of turning it into a combination orchard and flower garden. Under the direction of a comically sketched landscape designer, he made his dreams come true, despite the skepticism of his sitcom-like kids, a teen girl and a slacker boy named Zach, characterized as living in a dank room filled with unwashed laundry. The kids don’t really care–on the outside; but inside their hearts swell with pride as their dear old dad tames a recalcitrant patch of land into a Robert Creeley like garden of which Elizabeth Lawrence might have been proud.
His wife likes it too. Digging in the garden is like horticultural Viagra, and when he really gets going he rushes into the house and grabs her. “By the time I was done, I felt strangely, strongly aroused. That night, the smell of pollen still fresh in my nostrils, I made passionate, urgent love to my mystified (but appreciative) wife.” When I was a teen, we called this “TMI”–too much information–but it’s a nice reminder of the benefits of married life.
There’s a sinister side to gardening as well, as befits a hobby so elemental, and Alexander meets a strange contractor with a bizarre resemblance to Christopher Walken. Elsewhere he characterizes his battle with squirrels as “like living Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS, only with squirrels.”
Alexander is not what you’d call an outstanding writer, and some of his sentences bunch themselves up like caterpillars, but at his best he provides an insight into the myriad reasons men like to garden, and as a bonus he has a graceful way of inserting potted history lessons into his anecdotes. Discussing how difficult it is to grow apples organically in the northeast, he manages to bring in both Johnny Appleseed and his own horticultural hero, Thomas Jefferson. Did you know that St. Francis of Assisi was the one who first staged the now popular nativity creche scenes, and that he used actual animals to play the sheep, donkeys and lambs? And Alexander also can turn a poetic phrase: the first apple trees to bloom become “a merry explosion of pink and white popcorn.”
Finally, you’ll laugh hearing about his father’s ways with growing apples that bore little labels bleached into their skins, so that neighbors and relatives could have their own personalized apples, the “local community’s version of being invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.”
Sadly, I was never able to get far enough into this book to be able to give it a reasonable review. About halfway through, the author goes into chilling detail about his efforts to get rid of several of those pesky creatures that we call wildlife. When his efforts to keep said wildlife from his crops fail, he decides that they need to be killed. After his description of how he trapped an oppossum, left it in the sun to die and, failing that, tried to drown it (all witnessed by his children), I was finished with this book. The fact that this is offered up as humor makes me sick.
It is a story as old as America itself. When we dream, we dream big. Big houses, big cars and, in the case of The $64 Tomato, big gardens. In this book, author William Alexander details his love/hate relationship with his garden. I knew I was going to love this book within the first chapter, when I found myself laughing out loud time and time again. Alexander perfectly captures the idealism and absurdity that usually accompany any home improvement project.
I must say that, after my childhood of helping my Grandmother and my Father in the garden and even, reluctantly, maintaining my own small garden plot as a child, I found it a bit ludicrous that anyone would actually set out to “design” a vegetable garden. In my experience, you usually just mark out an area, have the neighbor plow it up and disc it down, lay out some string lines and plant. Aesthetics were rarely, if ever, an issue. Now you bring in experts, test the soil, try exotic new varieties of plants and, so it seems, endure many failures.
While the book is funny, it is also a trifle sad. There is an underlying current of hubris which seems to thrive in the heart of every American. We like to think we can conquer and control anything, even nature itself, when, in reality, we can only hold back nature for short periods of time and even then, only in relatively small areas. It is also a story of having eyes too large for our stomachs. Rows and rows of zucchini that must be given away, if not forced on the neighbors. Yes, we love having fresh food from our very own gardens, but it seems we have no self-control. If “some” is good than “more” must certainly be better.
The $64 Tomato is entertaining and enlightening because it is so true. Anyone with any aspirations to gardening will recognize themselves in its pages. Gardening, like life itself, is about struggle and this book details many struggles with bugs, grass, weeds and neighbors. Even then, I can guess that these were only a small portion of the troubles that occurred in the real garden. Television writers, like my wife, constantly deal with this issue. Just because something happened in real life, often times the viewers will never believe it. I would guess there are more stories that this gardening author has yet to tell.
The saddest part, but one that rings true, is the author’s struggle in finding balance between gardening as a task and gardening as a joy. I know that I experience this every day in my own garden and I am sure you do, too. It is a rare gardener who can find joy in pulling weeds time and time again That said, don’t let the dandelions get you down. Pour a nice, cool lemonade (preferably made from your own lemons), sit back in your favorite chair and enjoy, if just for a moment, the garden you have created. While I certainly hope you don’t spend $64 for each tomato you harvest, this book can make you laugh and give you solace in the knowledge that most gardener’s are happily suffering right along with you.
The author is a superb writer, I admit, but his research into organic gardening is shallow and very inadequate. I gardened in the Northeast for 20 years and never spent what he did and had almost none of the problems he had. Take his assertion that there are no organic apples in the northeast. My grandmother grew apples in Pennsylvania and had them in the middle of an area with 100 or so chickens. The chickens fertilized the ground and ate the bugs and pests that would have damaged the apples and she never had to use pesticides. The author could have attracted birds into his orchard and garden but he never mentions birds in his book. He also never mentioned trying companion planting, which is when you plant things to repel pests or plant them to draw the pests to them and not to what you want to eat. I have used companion planting very successfully but the author doesn’t seem to know about it. The main thing he missed was getting his soil healthy in the meadow by planting legumes to break up the clay and add nitogen. The author was sloppy in his research and now is spreading a bad message: That organic gardening often doesn’t work which has not ever been my experience in 40 years of gardening–20 years of which were in the Northeast. Shame on him.
For those of us who putter in gardens, William Alexander has done a good thing. His book “The $64 Tomato” blows the roof off home gardening. If this were a reality show, the title would be “Backyard Gardening: EXPOSED!!!!” But thank goodness, this isn’t television. A craftsman with words, Alexander writes with a light touch, delightful bursts of humor, and the wisdom of a man who has done some things in his life and learned from them.
A full complement of characters, human and otherwise, populate the book: Alexander’s long-suffering and loving family, a spooky handyman who looks and acts like Christopher Walken, a crew of exasperating contractors, and a menagerie of groundhogs, deer, Japanese beetles and sod webworms. This latter bunch, Alexander’s nemesis, is infuriating–and hugely entertaining for us onlookers. They defy Alexander at every turn. They come, they see his garden, and they conquer.
Most gardening books are earnest, reassuring adult versions of “The Little Engine That Could”: you can do it, you can do it. They assume a universe of order and control and endless amounts of time. Alexander will have none of it. His book is about labor, rapture, folly, joy, stress, sensuality, sweat, violence, despair and sex. Sounds a lot like life. Or reality TV.
For anyone who has every planted a tomato seedling in freshly turned earth on a bright spring day, Alexander and “The $64 Tomato” deliver a bountiful harvest.