GROW YOUR OWN: Always a good hobby, gardening is also a hedge against supply disruptions..

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: LIFESTYLE

THE FIRST TOMATO you grow yourself will probably be the most expensive one you ever eat. The same is true of peppers, zucchini, carrots, and any other crops you raise. While costs do go down as you gain expertise and reuse tools and materials, your initial gardening efforts will be less a means of saving money than a commitment to a hobby. But it's a rewarding hobby that builds skills, drives you a bit nuts, and offers you the means in uncertain times of supplying yourself and your neighbors with your favorite fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Supply came home to me as an issue when there were no garlic bulbs to be found at the market. "The whole shipment came in rotten," the produce manager told me. "It looked like it sat too long someplace."

That sort of problem is all too common in a year of supply-chain disruptions featuring shipping delays and intermittently empty shelves. "About 31% of grocery products consumers browsed were out of stock in the first week of April," CBS reported. "That's up from 11% at the end of November 2021."

Disruptions in fertilizer production, predating Russia's invasion of Ukraine but exacerbated by it, raise costs to farmers. The war also interfered with the cultivation and export of grain and other products from those countries, contributing to a "catastrophic global hunger crisis," in the cheery words of the United Nations' World Food Program. And while the vast farming acreage of the United States will cushion Americans from the worst effects, it's a fair bet that prices will continue to rise and the availability of some produce will remain spotty. Even expensive homegrown veggies are an alluring hedge against none.

What and how to grow depend to a large extent on where you live. I'm in Arizona, where the environment is a tad harsh and, as the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension puts it, "water is precious and expensive." So we look for drought-resistant and desert-adapted varieties of vegetables and fruits that have a hope of surviving in our conditions.

We've adopted square foot gardening, a technique that divides a garden into small, intensively planted sections. The term was coined by author Mel Bartholomew, and free information is available online from the Square Foot Gardening Foundation and other sources, including Clemson University's College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life...