Reviewed by Mary-Kate Mackey

The $64 Tomato chronicles William Alexander's vegetable gardening and his war on the critters, pests, and microscopic fauna that would rob him of his harvest. In this comic memoir of horticultural seduction and fall from grace, Alexander descends from the lofty ideals of organic to the grubby truth of chemical sprays. He wants the visual flawlessness depicted in the glossy garden magazines. He admits he is “a sucker for slick copy writing and beautiful photographs, experience notwithstanding." Yet he never realizes the consequences of his quest. His gardening path to perfection is paved with poisons--for his soil, his water table (his vegetables grow in raised beds on an intermittent wetlands) and his family who partake of his crops.

Told in more detail than non-gardening readers may prefer, the author's horticultural activities are frustrating for him--and the reader--because Alexander sacrifices his organic values without learning anything except how to buy new brands of toxins.  Interestingly, this expenditure is not included when he adds up exactly how much each tomato in his harvest is worth, arriving at the $64 figure.

Readers who do garden will experience a strong been-there-done-that feeling from the many well-written comic moments in Alexander's battles. Yet he never makes the connection between his horticultural methods and his dilemmas. He convinces himself that he needs chemical weapons. These, in turn, foster a rise in problems, ranging from new pests to an overabundance of fruit. He and his wife end up in a hot kitchen, laboriously canning too many peaches.

Perhaps if he had adhered to organic gardening, he might have had fewer peaches to process, albeit not quite as perfect. He laments how often he must hoe his garden, yet eschews the practice of layering thick mulch between his plants to discourage weeds because it doesn't fit his visual ideal.

Alexander holds conflicting ideas regarding the natural world without apparently noticing the dissonance. This lack of awareness makes the whole of his book less funny than the parts. He writes knowledgeably and with great admiration about the symbiotic relationship of earthworms and the soil, yet reports that he drenches his lawn with enough poisons to kill every living thing six inches deep. We wait in vain for Alexander to shift his point of view from gardening-as-war to gardening-as-partnership. Nature has plenty to teach him. If he could lower his expectations--well below the gardening eye candy--and raise his exploration of biodiversity, he might get there. As we follow him down his chemical track, he wonders, and we do too, why he is gardening at all. The eponymous tomato shows his folly on a monetary level, but the price is much higher than he thinks