Alexander's heart was in the right place; his dream of creating a beautiful garden was full of promise. "We were going to have a two thousand square foot garden...No more agonizing decisions over whether to plant squash or lettuce. We could plant everything." Moving his family from Yonkers to an old house in the Hudson Valley, he encountered a heck of a lot more than he bargained for.

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, is Alexander's amusing journal of his various gardening trials and tribulations. Why did he want to garden, anyway? "Everyone thought we were crazy when we bought an abandoned, ninety-year old country house with missing windows and no kitchen, heat or running water, and we had proved the skeptics wrong. We were living our country life, cooking and gardening together in our restored house and this seemed the next logical step, doing for this field of grass and weeds what we had done for the house."

Little did Alexander realize the other "fringe benefits" that gardening had in store for him: high water bills, marauding deer (which resulted in the installment of an electric fence), endless cultivating (or weeding), using pesticides, and fending off crafty attacks from an intelligent woodchuck and a drooling opossum.

It nearly drove the poor man insane-after years of being a slave to the garden, he questioned where his joy went. "Gardening is often thought to be a genteel, relaxing hobby, an activity for the women of the garden club as they dally about in their straw hats, fitting lotioned hands into goatskin gloves, sipping tea under the shade of a magnolia. I am not a member of that club. For me, gardening more often resembles blood sport, a never ending battle with the weather, insects, deer, groundhogs, weeds, edgy gardeners, incompetent contractors, and the limitations of my own middle-aged body. And it turns out to be a very expensive sport." Why, then, you may ask, does he continue in gardening hell? He's not sure, either, but those delicious home-grown Brandywine tomatoes are partly to blame! I guess devoted gardeners are on a different, soil enriched plane--the satisfaction of cultivating and eating what you've grown is definitely worth the back breaking effort. Alexander knows the score; after tallying up all his expenses, those Brandywine tomatoes cost him $64 a piece. Now that's love!

—Marnie Richman