Miles Okonkwo 
One winter I sat down and roughly added up what my vegetable garden costs against what it produces. The honest answer is that I am not saving money on most of it. Here is why the beds are still going in this spring.
The season everything failed produced one plate of food in September that I still think about. I have spent two years trying to work out whether it was actually that good or whether scarcity did the cooking.
I counted a whole summer of balcony tomatoes and the number was small enough to be funny. Here is the honest accounting of what a few pots produce, and the reasons I keep doing it that have nothing to do with the amount of food.
Seventy-four basil seedlings for a household of two. Why the packet always wins, why I cannot make myself thin a cell, what crowding costs on the plate, and the one low-effort habit that helped a little.
Those cheap pots of basil are not really plants, they are a bunch of herbs with roots attached. Here is what happens when you try to keep one alive, and the one step that actually helps.
A bag of liquefied cucumbers in the back of the crisper drawer forced me to admit that my glut problem was never a storage problem. It was a planting problem, and then a cooking problem.
Textbook crop rotation assumes you have a field. I have four boxes and a path. Here is the crude system I ended up with after my best tomato bed quietly stopped growing good tomatoes, and the problems rotation did not fix.
I spent two seasons cooking my best vegetables into submission, making elaborate dishes to justify the effort of growing them. The ratatouille and the pureed carrot soup taught me that the plain version was usually the better one.
One season I lost the squash overnight, the brassicas to caterpillars, and most of the seedlings to slugs. This is what actually happened, what I did with my hands instead of a sprayer, and which losses I decided to simply accept.
An eggplant I left on the plant nine days too long taught me that picking early and picking late are two completely different mistakes, and only one of them is recoverable at the stove.