I am glad to see more articles on growing your own food.  I'm 30 now and started in my early twenties at the old boston victory garden's, which are the community gardens.  I've started out small with lettuce, tomatoes and squash and moved on to bigger crops such as corn, pumkins, watermelon and this year okra.  Of course all of these vegetables have gone thru trial and error, watching the old italian and russian couples and of course books.

I would also like to point out that during the last year, i have seen the community garden fill up quick with new gardeners.  However i just hope that they don't end up like all the other newcomers in recent years and put little effort or time into their plots.  That is the one key to a successful harvest.  

As books go, i would definetly suggest lasagna gardening.  

Another angle to this story is the backyard commercial farming movement. A growing corps of entrepreneurial farmers throughout the U.S. and Canada  are practicing sub-acre SPIN-Farming. SPIN is a franchise-ready vegetable farming system that makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half acre.  SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds.

By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, SPIN allows many more people to farm, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them.  By utilizing backyards and front lawns and neighborhood lots as their land base, SPIN farmers are recasting farming as a small business in cities and towns and helping to make local food production a viable business proposition once again. Most importantly, this is happening without significant policy changes or government supports. You can see some of these entrepreneurial sub-acre farmers in action at www.spinfarming.com

I was delighted to see Christina Gillham's article on urban farming. Having started my own "home farm" just this year, I found that I am not just growing food for myself, but for my friends, family, and neighbors as well. Planting the backyard garden has helped build community in our neighborhood, which is something I could never can get from a supermarket. I have found growing food to be exceptionally easy with the help of the book "The Urban Homestead" by by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. It's a great book to start with if you've never grown food before. Having a huge salad filled with the lettuces, radishes, beans and peppers that we grew in our home farm to be incredibly rewarding, far more than even a good day at the office could be.

Wow!  This is great.  What makes it even better, is that I know this person via the freedomgardens.org site.  What a small world this is.  I'm in the process of doing the same thing - working on making my lawn productive, growing food, chickens, herbs, etc. Okay, enough of me.  

Oh, and connect with Yvette Roman at:  http://www.my.freedomgardens.org/yvette -- and look me up -- I'm WildIndigo.  :-)