The joys<br > of growsng<br > your own<br >Why， people sometimes ask me， do you grow your own food? Why<br >go to all the trouble of tilling， planting and weeding a piece of your<br >valuable backyard for vegetables? Aren t all those fruit trees and<br >berrybushes a lot of work? Well， I generally answer such questions<br >with a few of my own. When was the last time you bit into a really<br >delicious peach， the juice fairly bursting through the skin? When<br >was the last time you sat down to a steaming plate of fresh aspar-<br >agus-the tender just-ripe tips， not the stringy kind you generally<br >get at the supermarket? When was the last time you could even<br >find sweet corn picked fresh enough to be really sweet， or rasp-<br >berries plump enough to make cold cereal a gourmet dish?<br > The answer， of course， is pretty much what I expected: all<br >too long ago. For even if most Americans are well fed， most of them<br >are also missing the incomparable taste of truly fresh vegetables<br >and fruits. Those small， often hard tomatoes you buy at the store<br >were probably picked when they were still green; moreover， they<br >are of a variety developed not so much for their flavor as for their<br >shipping and handling qualities--including a tough protective skin.<br >Chances are， particularly if you buy them during the off season，<br >that they came from a big mechanized farm in a distant state--Cal-<br >ifornia， for example， produces a quarter of all the table food sold in<br >the United States， including nearly two thirds of the tomatoes， Ac-<br >tually the produce industry supplies us with an incredible harvest<br >--refrigerated， frozen， canned， dried--and much of it available<br >almost everywhere at almost every season of the year. What the in-<br >dustry cannot do at long range and in large quantities， however， is<br >to supply most vegetables and fruits the way people like to think<br >of them : truly fresh. To get them that way， you either have to live<br >next to a friendly truck gardener---or grow them yourself.<br > If you grow your own， you certainly get freshness and you<br >may also save some money--but then again you may not. On the<br >face of it you can beat store prices every time， but when you stop to<br > add up the cost of fertilizers， peat moss， mulch， pesticides， garden<br > A proud gardener contemplates the fruits<br > ot his labor--an eye-popping tomato---on the<br > cover ot a 1911 seed catalogue. Earliana<br > varieties ere still grown， but disease-<br > resistant types have all but replaced them，<br >