Opinion: How green was my garden, and how much green can it save me?

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Just about everyone who lives in a house in an non-gated part of L.A., renter or owner, comes home to find business cards wedged into a crevice of the mailbox or the front door. Enterprising gardeners seeking work put them there before fire season, when you want to clean up your property for the inspectors. They put them there before the rains come, when you want to see your garden green and blooming a few months later.

This week, the card I found was different. It didn’t mention flowerbeds. It was vividly illustrated with delectables like potatoes and artichokes and mushrooms, and it pledged to deliver ‘organic soil for you to grow your home organic vegetables.’

It’s the economy, and it’s not stupid at all. Anyone with a digestive tract knows how much fresh produce is costing. And any urbanite or suburbanite with a patch of land -- even the minuscule L.A. lawn -- is feeling that temptation to live off the land a little, to preside over your own bumper crop of food instead of flora. The 21st-century victory garden sounds so enticing, so virtuous, so thrifty. The world’s biggest seed company, Burpee, hasn’t seen demand like this in decades.

For someone who grew up with the family farm, I know that the best use of our limited time and even more limited land isn’t cultivating potatoes and mushrooms and even corn. Sometimes economies of scale really do work. You don’t even need to read William Alexander’s nifty book to learn a lesson about folly from its title: ‘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.’

But a nice little patch for tomatoes and zucchini, though -- now you’re talking. Agri-dustrial tomatoes run to the taste and texture of baseballs, and zucchini is the comically copious crop that keeps on giving -- to you, the neighbors, to people at work, to perfect strangers. I think I’ll limit my home-grown edibles to those.

In the meantime, I’ll be sure to put that pretty card, carefully, in the recycling bin.