i expected this to be something in the vein of all those sustainable gardening/lefty quasi-gentleman farmer memoirs making the rounds these days, with page after page dedicated to the author's environmental rights decision-making processes & lofty pronouncements on the superiority of home-grown tomatoes. what i actually got was so much funnier & more satisfying! i mean, yes, the dude acknowledges that he could conceivably be seen as a gentleman farmer, he describes himself several times as a liberal khaki-wearing NPR-listening satchel-toter, & he does spill a little ink on the superiority of his home home-grown brandywine tomatoes, but there is so much more here! i actually laughed out loud a couple of times, which i almost never do while reading.

the author & his wife buy a house in the hudson valley. it needs a lot of repairs, but it has a huge yard & they daydream about growing the garden of their fantasies. they even hire a landscape designer & her husband contractor to arrange it for them, which kind of blew my mind. the hijinks start right away, as the house is located in a region that used to be rife with brick factories, thanks to the brick-quality clay in the soil. the contractor drags his feet digging the beds for the garden until the frost has started, & then can't complete the job because the yard is just one enormous brick.

but eventually the garden is dug & plants are planted. & the rest of the book documents the many foibles that ensued, including the author's attempts to grow a "sound of music"-quality meadow, culminating in the near-decision to arrange a controlled burn to combat the unwanted weeds choking the meadow, the darwinian progression of woodchucks living under the woodshed, evolving to one super woodchuck willing to brave an electric fence to loll about in the garden & eat tomatoes, the horrifying karma that followed the capture of an oppossum in the live animal trap, etc. i personally do not garden & am not really interested in gardening, & i still thought this book was awesome. all of my gardening friends should definitely check it out.