A bumper crop of books about vegetable gardening claims that the answer is in our own backyards. Not one convinces me, but they all make a good case for the simple joy of growing things. The best is the breezy, cantankerous and funny GROW THE GOOD LIFE: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
(Rodale, $24.99), by Michele Owens, a co-founder of the fabulous Garden Rant blog. Owens’s warm, enthusiastic, bossy-boots tone will make you want to swipe your credit card in soil. First, though, let me get my own garden rant out of the way. Why must cheerleaders for backyard veggies repeat the canard that Michelle Obama’s White House garden cost only $180? Just price the lumber, wire mesh, soil, mulch, amendments, pipes, spigots and seeds — never mind the labor — for a 1,100-square-foot plot. Was it the taxes that came to $180?

You won’t necessarily get a fast return on your investment, but Owens’s own home economics are sensible. Vegetable gardens, she reminds us, “require less and less time, labor and money every year as the soil gets richer.” She genially refuses to engage in the usual patter about how to water what plant, knowing most of us just point and shoot. And she makes short work of how-tos: “First, take care of the . . . soil. Second, diversify to avoid disaster. Third, pay attention to timing. And fourth, be a little Zen.” The only way to learn to garden is to do it.

Owens boldly stakes a claim for the moral superiority of the home grower. Why delicious food doesn’t suffice as its own best argument, I don’t know. “Thanks to my garden,” Owens declares, “I can take a small stand against everything I find witless, lazy and ugly in our civilization.” Which is a lot. The vegetable garden, it turns out, is a ripening political force: the best response to the energy crisis, the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the family crisis and the financial crisis.

Most of the country’s population lives in cities and suburbs, even if, as Owens says, suburbia is “so 20th century. And it’s over.” Realistically, though, if home growing is to gain serious traction, it will happen in the suburbs. It’s unlikely that any city will grow enough to feed its population, even though fantastic urban green roofs are defying tail-pipe emissions, rats and flaking lead. It will be no small irony if suburbia becomes the locavore’s home of choice. And growing backyard veggies could be the answer to the crisis of disaffected suburban youth.

At the least, vegetable gardening is a healthy trend. But Owens has a vision of saving the world with “a billion sustainable backyard gardens and small farms.” As with knitting a sweater, one row is meaningless; 90 don’t add up to much; but eventually you get something useful. Hers is a slow revolution, but one about which it could cheerfully be said that the end justifies the means. On a macro level, I’m not persuaded that small farms can feed everyone, but I’ll take homegrown micro greens any day.

Sarah Hayden Reichard has written a modest and unassuming but powerful book, THE CONSCIENTIOUS GARDENER: Cultivating a Garden Ethic
(University of California Press, $27.50), arguing that gardeners should be on the front line when it comes to recognizing the interconnection of mankind and nature. “Practices and products,” she writes, have crept into the craft of gardening “that decrease its long-term sustainability.” I, for one, will never again resort to pesticides or peat moss after reading her book. Reichard’s chapter on soil, “the skin of the earth,” is an excellent refresher for any gardener. There are 20,000 identified types of soil in the United States alone. Dirt may even be the new Prozac. Both Reichard and Owens mention that working the soil might alleviate depression: a specific soil bacterium has been found to activate serotonin-releasing neurons. Which would, at the very least, explain why more gardeners don’t throw down their shovels and quit.

The chicest — and I use the term advisedly — book of the season is the lavish BEEKEEPER’S BIBLE: Bees, Honey, Recipes and Other Home Uses
(Stewart, Tabori Chang, $35). Beekeeping has new cachet as a status indicator among the moneyed classes. Luckily, it’s an exemplary activity for anyone to do — or read about.

Thick as a family Bible, this team effort by Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch reads like a textbook, lacking the buzz of authorial personality. Still, it’s hard to go wrong with such a remarkable subject. The Bushmen of southern Africa believed the first human was born when a bee planted a seed in a mantis’s body. In Roman times, secret love letters were carved into wax tablets, from which the incriminating evidence could be easily removed. Jones and Sweeney-Lynch explain the science and society of bees in clear, accessible language. And the recipes are admirably useful: honey scones, honey soap, honey hangover cures. “Oh, stuff and fluff,” as Pooh might say. Dip a paw into this richly satisfying volume and you won’t have to do stoutness exercises.

Dominique Browning, author of the memoir “Slow Love,” writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Web site and blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.