Long before the recent interest in biofuels made it a smart thing to be, I was a corn farmer. My career began, on a bright spring morning, in my childhood suburban Connecticut backyard. Beside a rickety swing set that nowadays would have been bookmarked on Google Maps by every personal-injury lawyer in the county, I scratched a hole in a patch of bare dirt with a teaspoon and dropped in a handful of kernels.

When harvest day eventually arrived, the haul was-unsurprisingly-not much to look at: two pale ears, about the size of my index finger, that my mother boiled briefly and presented to me as an amuse-bouche before my daily bologna sandwich.

The corn was an experiment of sorts. Because I had no easy access to chicken manure, I couldn't aspire to being a champion tomato grower like my grandmother. It was she who had introduced me to the pleasures of planting things. On summer Saturdays, fueled by our usual breakfast of silver-dollar pancakes swimming in Karo syrup, we'd descend into her garden for a few hours of weeding and staking and watering. At noon, we'd climb back up to the kitchen for a well-earned lunch, which typically consisted of crisp fresh lettuce on toast with salted slices of beefsteak tomato. She'd also pour me a jelly glass full of Pabst-a gesture of grown-up solidarity that neither of us ever felt the need to discuss with my parents. I was eight or nine at the time, and it felt as though I was being initiated into some large subterranean secret. The toil (and the beer) made planting and then tending to what grew seem like a gratifyingly adult pursuit.

As I got older, I tried my hand at other crops: radishes, cucumbers, yellow squash, carrots, an assortment of windowsill herbs. The results, for the most part, would have made Alice Waters rethink her insistence on local produce (my thumbs have never been any darker than celery green). But there was usually something edible in whatever sprouted, and with each passing season I was learning something new about what to feed when, and how much to water, and what could get by with less than perfect sunlight. When I went off to college, and my freshman roommate announced that he was going to grow his own pot, I didn't for a second worry that our dorm would soon be the scene of a noisy midnight raid. One look at his setup-a few inches of dry potting mix in a cardboard box tucked into a dark corner near his bed-and I knew the project was doomed.

Several years ago, after a long hiatus, my farming instinct kicked in again. My wife and I gained rights to the two terraces that flank our Manhattan apartment, and among the various containers that now house a nursery's worth of decorative specimens are two boxes and a handful of pots set aside for vegetation we can eat. We've grown arugula and beets, zucchini and strawberries (which got a big talons-up from the neighborhood birds), and even managed by accident to produce a half dozen sweet potatoes, from vines that fattened their roots instead of trailing picturesquely. And every year, we get a modest though reliable supply of cherry and sauce tomatoes, along with thyme, rosemary, chives, sage, and enough basil for a winter's worth of pesto.

Though I'm immoderately pleased when our 11th-floor garden provides the ingredients for a couple of salads, or the flavoring for a friend's holiday turkey stuffing, I'm well aware that my agricultural fantasy is less about putting food on the table than it is about ritual and some urban semblance of connection to the seasons. It gets me outside on a regular basis for a restorative helping of sun and of dirt, which I can wear under my fingernails as a sign that I've been up to something simpler and more noble than office work. It also means that, come September, I can sit outside with viny tangles of morning glory and hyacinth bean in my lap, culling seeds for next year.

Even more than that, it helps me to pay more attention to the produce I buy, and it lets me consider the offerings at the weekly farmers market out on Broadway with some understanding of what it took to grow them. To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott, "It's no radicchio ye're buying, it's men's lives."

So the next time you're down at the hardware store-even if the only room you have is a few inches of countertop next to the window over the sink-why not grab a packet of seeds, a few pots, and a bag of soil? Plant something. Watch it grow. Participate in the natural scheme of things.

And if the cashier knows a good source for chicken manure, let me know.

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