Vegetables and Fruits [antikvár]

The joys of growing your own c_Why, people sometimes ask me, do you grow your own food? Why go to all the trouble of tilling, planting and weeding a piece of your valuable backyard for vegetables? Aren't all those fruit trees and berrybushes a lot of work? Well, I generally answer such questions with a few of my own. When was the last time you bit into a really delicious peach, the juice fairly bursting through the skin? When was the last time you sat down to a steaming plate of fresh asparagusthe tender just-ripe tips, not the stringy kind you generally get at the supermarket? When was the last time you could even find sweet corn picked fresh enough to be really sweet, or raspberries plump enough to make cold cereal a gourmet dish?The answer, of course, is pretty much what I expected: all too long ago. For even if most Americans are well fed, most of them are also missing the incomparable taste of truly fresh vegetables and fruits. Those small, often hard tomatoes you buy at the store were probably picked when they were still green; moreover, they are of a variety developed not so much for their flavor as for their shipping and handling qualitiesincluding a tough protective skin. Chances are, particularly if you buy them during the off season, that they came from a big mechanized farm in a distant stateCalifornia, for example, produces a quarter of all the table food sold in the United States, including nearly two thirds of the tomatoes. Actually the produce industry supplies us with an incredible harvest refrigerated, frozen, canned, driedand much of it available almost everywhere at almost every season of the year. What the industry cannot do at long range and in large quantities, however, is to supply most vegetables and fruits the way people like to think of them: truly fresh. To get them that way, you either have to live next to a friendly truck gardeneror grow them yourself.If you grow your own, you certainly get freshness and you may also save some moneybut then again you may not. On the face of it you can beat store prices every time, but when you stop to add up the cost of fertilizers, peat moss, mulch, pesticides, garden