Invest in Gardens, Where Yields Make Wall St. Blush

With the economic outlook darkening, there’s still one good investment that will help you weather the downturn, George Ball writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: a garden. The “astonishing garden-grown return on investment is not modern-day speculative sleight-of-hand, but real, tangible and fungible,” the chairman of the Burpee seed company writes. He figures planting instead of buying at market produces “a 25-to-1 return.”

“Yet this ratio fails to factor in the abundant and tangible nonfinancial returns,” Ball continues: “flavor, freshness, a nutritional bonanza for your family.” If you buy seeds, you can also hope for “$150 earned for every $1 invested.” And then there’s the joy of work, “replacing the banal gyrations of the marketplace with the elements of sun, earth and water, and reducing the need for costly anti-depressants.” (More gardening stories.)