There are as many reasons to garden as there are gardeners. With a little land or a few pots, seed, tools, and compost, anyone willing to put in the time can grow food that tastes like itself.

Growing vegetables can cost less than buying them — unless you pay yourself an hourly wage to weed — especially herbs, salad greens, and tomatoes in season. Food you pick ripe may be more nutritious than produce shipped green. We live in an age in which food marketing is all about cholesterol, fiber, and this or that type of fat. Gardening is a way out of eating “nutrients” as a marketing category, and back to eating plants.

In an era when many people are almost completely sedentary — or go to great lengths to “exercise” — gardening is useful activity, strenuous or not, with an end product that does not require gym clothes. For those overwhelmed by the pace of modern life, it is a focused, mindful break from noise. For others, the feeling of stewardship of a piece of land, of soil and plants, is the point.

For those with children, it is one of the best ways to introduce the natural world and where food comes from. And many people simply like it.