My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season

This passionate gardener's daily record of a growing season adds up to one of the best pieces of garden writing in years.

But this book is about much more than planting, tending, and harvesting a vegetable garden.

It's about all the things that influence this gardener: the weather, the neighborhood, his wife's possibly recurring cancer, the changing nature of the academic community; it's about the last months of his twenty-year-old cat, about his dog, and about all the other humans and animals in his gardening world. And about his family: the aunts and uncles who cared for and fed a six-year-old orphan and instilled in him the understanding that good food was a way of knowing that someone cared.

In all the gardens he has tended, the dills he has pickled, and the dinners he has cooked, Klaus has tried to carry on that tradition and pass it on to his own children.