Even those without outdoor space can rent a plot to grow veggies at a local community garden (though in some cities, wait lists can run two years or more). For the past seven years Jeremy Barrows, of Hartford, Conn., has grown veggies on a community garden on the site of a former nursing home that burned down in 1945 due to faulty Christmas decorations, killing 21. “I pay a whopping $15 a year and I chip in the same amount to the foundation as a donation,” he says. “But having worked the same plot for several years, improving the soil with my own kitchen compost, I have more of a sense of ownership of it than I do of my rented apartment.”

The downside of urban gardening is that if you don’t test your soil, you might be growing your very own backyard poison apples (or snap peas, or collard greens or carrots), which sort of defeats the point. Some urban and suburban gardeners have been dismayed to discover that their organic veggies have been gestating in great vats of lead-poisoned soil: One organic gardener quoted in the New York Times earlier this year found his veggies contained more than 90 times the amount of lead expected to occur in nature.

We worked around that particular problem by building raised beds, lining them with landscape fabric, and trucking in 60 bags of fresh soil and lumber in borrowed cars and, more often, bit by bit in a metal granny cart from Home Depot and Lowe's and gardening stores, conveniently located across the expressway from us.

Unfortunately the soil alone, even at $6 a bag, was enough to make our garden the most expensive endeavor we took on last year. (Cheaper solutions include mixing lime and compost into the existing soil; Carpenter went all out and borrowed a friend’s truck to haul in rotting horse manure she got for free from local horse farmers). It’s for this reason I sometimes laugh when new gardeners talk about all the money they’ll save on fresh produce. This summer, however -- one in which we, like just about everyone else, are feeling much poorer than we did last year -- we probably spent less on our seed than we would have on veggies at the farmers’ market (or the often better produce sold wholesale at a shop under the expressway).

Yes, we are renters, and no, our landlord didn’t reimburse us for anything other than the wood for the fence we put up after the first one was butted down by the neighbor’s particularly energetic Rottweiler. But few things are as coveted in New York City -- or any other city -- as outdoor space, and we never could have afforded the rent for a two-bedroom apartment with a yard like ours if we hadn’t hacked it out ourselves. My boyfriend likes to think there’s a certain amount of renters’ karma in leaving something beautiful on an ugly block for the next person. Summer days, I write outside with our animals running between my feet, while pulling out the hose and nibbling on mint and arugula between paragraphs. Nights we have friends over and drink cocktails and project movies onto the white wall that adjoins the tire shop next door, while Marcello, the paranoid schizophrenic neighbor who has broadcast his opinions about politics, Cuba and lesbians -- along with the size of his penis -- since 1973, leans out his window bare-chested and reads the newspaper, and sometimes his court documents, at top volume. But when you are sitting on a patio you built with your own hands, next to a big pot of homegrown lavender, the cars on the expressway almost sound like the ocean.

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