When I give talks about the changes we need in our food system, I am often met by skepticism that it can be done. How can our nation possibly shift away from large farms? It would mean a lot more farmers and probably higher priced food. Plus, suburban sprawl tends to raise real estate prices and move our farmland farther and farther from population centers. That means many farmers live nowhere near their customers, making it pretty hard for many of us to "eat local."

Well, one solution is gardening. And, to many of us, this sounds impossible. Gardening? You mean millions of Americans are actually going to turn the TV off, dig up their lawns, get their hands dirty, and grow their own food? Certainly, even if they did do that – how the heck could they grow enough to make up a significant part of their diets? Of course there’s Barbara Kingsolver’s popular book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about her family’s yearlong adventure growing their own food (even making their own cheese and raising and then slaughtering their own chickens and turkeys!). It makes for a good story, but it also shows how much dang work it all is.

When it comes to imagining a future nation of gardeners, seeing is believing. I am proud to say that I am now a believer. And, before you read on, consider this: During World War II, Victory Gardens provided 40 percent of the nation’s produce.

Before recently, I was a skeptic about the role of gardening in food system reform. OH BOY was I a skeptic. I am friendly with a number of urban ag fanatics (who I would describe with adjectives like "zealous" and "militant" in their enthusiasm for urban agriculture and their belief that it will be the salvation of this country). Until recently, quite frankly, I thought they were nuts. Maybe, I thought, urban ag could account for 2 percent of the country’s food. And that’s nice. It’s hugely significant for the people it affects… but it leaves the other 98 percent of the country without a solution.

I’d even tried gardening a few times, although I was met with total failure. I had a hard time understanding the instructions on the seed packages and I couldn’t really get anything to grow. Besides, I’ve spent most of my adult life living in apartments and when I did have patios, they didn’t get much sunlight. Gardening in any sort of significant way is impossible without a yard. Once I asked an organic farmer if I could work on his farm for a few days. He agreed to let me stay with him and work but when I showed up the work was so grueling and miserable that I barely lasted even that long. (Ever tried weeding an onion field in 100 degree heat? I don’t recommend it. After less than an hour I was begging for mercy.) I was left feeling like growing food must be some kind of mystical, magical, and very difficult task that only certain special people could succeed in doing. And how can you possibly expect people to grow food if they don’t have a home with a yard?

Here in San Diego, I sometimes participate in a few organizations that promote gardening and urban ag (San Diego Roots and San Diego Food Not Lawns). They run gardening workshops and trainings, run various community gardens or school gardens, and even dream of opening an educational farm. There’s also a group currently trying to get the city to pass laws that are friendlier to starting new community gardens. I usually show up for the potlucks because when you’re dining with gardeners, the food is always great. You end up with lasagne made with tomatoes somebody grew and homemade cheese, homemade strawberry ginger jam made from homegrown strawberries, or even homemade beer or mead. And, since it’s San Diego, there’s always lots of wonderful citrus. Some of the people in the group keep chickens or bees in their yards. I have tremendous respect for these people, but I really did not think that any amount of training would make me enjoy or succeed in growing my own food.

That all changed in the past few months, ever since I met and moved in with my boyfriend. The turning point was my visit to Growing Power, an urban farm in Milwaukee, WI. Growing Power is internationally famous, and some of the people I’ve met who have visited there are obsessive about it to the point of seeming weird. For all I know, maybe I now seem weird to others too. The work they do at Growing Power is AMAZING. It’s simply incredible to watch food waste turn into rich, living soil and then into food. They grow so much in such a small space (often by making use of vertical space), and they do it year round. If you click the link above, you’ll see the pictures I took there, and you’ll get some idea of what I’m talking about. It’s just incredible.

I arrived at Growing Power doubting that urban ag could ever play a significant role in re-localizing food, and I left fully convinced that one or more Growing Power-like urban farms in each U.S. city could absolutely revolutionize the way we eat while simultaneously enriching the environment and keeping an awful lot of waste out of the landfills.

When I got home from Growing Power, I decided to start a worm bin. I took my boyfriend’s three year old to a local organic nursery to get some worms and they offered us a deal: Instead of paying about $20 for a big bag of worms, we could pay a tiny fraction of that if we’d dug the worms up ourselves. Well, why not? What could go wrong with a three year old, an enormous pile of mud, and lots of worms? (Plenty – but that’s another story.) So the two of us got a container and a few shovels and started digging.

When we got home, my boyfriend’s older daughter wanted to dig for worms too, and pretty soon, we ended up taking the entire Brownie troop to the nursery to dig for worms (see pics at the link). At the end of our tour of the nursery, "Farmer Bill" (the owner of the nursery and our tour guide) gave each girl a little container, some potting soil, and a fava bean. He showed us how to plant our fava bean and how to care for them at home. I have to admit I was a little bit shocked. Really? It’s that easy? Just put this little fava bean in the dirt and it will grow? Just like that?

And it DID grow. So we planted it in the ground. Then we planted some carrots. And some sugarsnap peas. And buttercup squash. Then "Santa" somehow got wind of our family’s gardening adventures so he (actually she in our case) put organic seeds in each of our stockings. I received cabbage, the kids got broccoli and cauliflower, and my boyfriend got onions. Santa also gave us a few pairs of gardening gloves, and one of the girls’ aunts saw that we were gardening from our Facebook updates and bought the little one a kiddie gardening kit for Christmas. Suddenly, we became a family of gardeners, and our yard became a garden!

I’ve been chronicling our gardening adventures on my blog (the latest update is here but if you scroll to the bottom you’ll see links to the rest of the posts). The kids are being kids, which means that the little one is very enthusiastic but sometimes more of a hindrance than a help, and the older one isn’t always in the mood to head outside and get her hands all dirty. Still, they are seeing how food is produced and I’m thrilled. They are learning a lot about science too. Today our older daughter asked if we’d plant the cauliflower with the onions, and I explained that we put related veggies together – so the cauliflower goes with the "Brassica" group (broccoli and cabbage), whereas the garlic and onions will go together by themselves. I also told her a little bit about crop rotation, and I explained that legumes (like our fava beans) fix nitrogen in the soil. She replied by asking if we could grow lima beans (yes! oh yes!).

So if you can’t tell, I’ve been bit by the gardening bug something awful. I spend my evenings wishing I could be outside gardening, I wake up looking forward to gardening, and the past few nights, I’ve even dreamed about gardening. It’s surprisingly easy when you have a source of good advice. Instead of winging it, I ask "Farmer Bill" what to do and then, when I do it, food grows in my yard. Amazing!

Of course, there’s a little bit of a catch. For one thing, gardening takes time. I’m our family’s main gardener because I’m a freelance writer (which bears a striking resemblance to being unemployed). My boyfriend works and our older girl goes to school. The little one is my gardening buddy but you can’t expect much from a three year old. We have a good day when she doesn’t kill any of the plants. And, I have to say that it makes a lot of sense for one partner in any relationship to stay home and raise the kids, particularly if you are engaged in gardening, cooking, canning, pickling, fermenting, or freezing food. It takes a lot of time, and much of it has to be done during the day. And at age three, our little one demands 100% of our attention. There are very few times when she is happily playing all by herself, unless she’s on the computer or we let her watch a movie. I can’t afford to live on my writing income. And my boyfriend’s job doesn’t provide health insurance and never will. No doubt this is the predicament of many families. People work because they don’t have a choice, and they don’t have time to garden because they work.

The other roadblock to saving the world with gardening is that many city dwellers don’t have yards. Some people have roof gardens, of course. Some people have plots in community gardens. But we need an awful lot more green space in order for urban food production to really take off in a meaningful way. In San Diego, laws make it very hard to establish new community gardens. This problem is not shared by all cities, but where it is a problem, it’s a big problem.

On the positive side, gardening has surged in the past few years – partially because people need to grow their own food to save money, and partially because of social factors like Michelle Obama’s garden. And there’s been some great coverage lately of urban farming as a way to revitalize Detroit. And there’s the brilliant work of LaDonna Redmond in Chicago, Growing Power in Milwaukee, the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, and more around the country. This is a growing movement (no pun intended) and I think it can play a significant role in producing much of our nation’s food. But in order to truly reach its potential, I think we need laws and institutions that support and grow the middle class so that as many people as possible can participate.