For some people, backyard gardening is a pleasant and relaxing hobby. For some, it is a source of fresh, delicious produce for the family dinner table. And for some of us, it can become a kind of religion.

Gardening has become the number one hobby in America, as more and more people discover how completely it can clear your mind of stress and worries. Pulling up a stubborn tree root is a much more pleasant form of exercise that yanking on weighted cables at the gym, and will give you biceps just as hard with a much greater sense of satisfaction. In today's world, we often work very hard without much visible result, so sitting in your backyard and gazing at a lush little square of green that you planted and tended gives you a sense of accomplishment that may be missing in other areas of your life.

Gardening for Food

Anyone who has ever tasted a ripe tomato picked off the vine will never again be satisfied with the tasteless, colorless spheres sold by that name in grocery stores. A twelve-ounce bag of mesclun may sell for around three dollars, but a packet of seeds will cost you less than two dollars and produce for weeks. Sugar snap peas are another exotic item that can be easily and inexpensively grown. . .and pea shoots are about the cutest things you've ever seen.

For me, though, one of the greatest rewards of backyard gardening is, for lack of a better word, a spiritual one. Putting your hands directly into the earth is a totally different feeling from playing with pots and bags of manufactured soil. Looking at a seed the size of a dust mote, and knowing that a big, gorgeous flower will result from it instills a sense of mystery and awe. And anyone who has planted a daffodil bulb as the first snowflakes of winter begin to fall knows the meaning of the word "faith."