My Vegetable Love

"Home gardeners, cooks and nature lovers will savor this delightful account" of a journey from first spring planting to final fall harvest ( Publishers Weekly).   My Vegetable Love is a daily record of a growing season in Iowa—but it's about much more than planting peppers, tending tomatoes, or harvesting eggplants. It's about all the things that influence this gardener: the weather, the neighborhood, his wife's possibly recurring cancer, the changing nature of the academic community. It's about the last months of his twenty-year-old cat, about his dog, and about all the other humans and animals in his gardening world. And about his family: the aunts and uncles who cared for and fed a six-year-old orphan, and helped him understand that good food was a way of knowing that someone cared.   In all the gardens he has tended, the dills he has pickled, and the dinners he has cooked, Carl H. Klaus has tried to carry on that tradition and pass it on to his own children—and in this "delectable" book, he shares it with us as well ( Publishers Weekly).   "Part Gilbert White, part Henry David Thoreau, this chronicle of an Iowa gardener's year has drawn from the heartland a calm, compassionate harvest." —Roger B. Swain, host of PBS's Victory Garden   "Wholeheartedly celebrates friendship, love, pets, the elements of family, academia, cooking, eating—and of course, gardening . . . Bon appétit—and good reading." — Smithsonian