Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community isn’t just about growing food. In fact, the book’s vision is a much broader, far-ranging one about building communities and neighborhoods — and movements to benefit these new groups.

The gist is this: Grow organic gardens, and use that process to build a self-sustaining, more interactive and interrelational community that’ll help protect environment, individual health — as well as provide a whole slew of other interpersonal benefits.

Food Not Lawns‘ll give you pretty much all the inspiration you need to get your own garden going — whether that’s a little balcony garden for your apartment or a huge community garden for your entire neighborhood. The book even includes some very hardcore gardening advice, including how to prune trees, make a slime monster, and engage in guerilla gardening.

In fact, Heather Flores, author of Food Not Lawns, is one hardcore activist gardener. Yes, she’s started all manners of community gardens, but beyond that, she lives on $6,000 a year, with no fridge or hot water in the kitchen. And for the most part, she makes all of this sound like a helluva lot of fun.

Reading about what Heather’s been able to do with her life, it’s easy for the would-be newbie gardener to get overwhelmed. I, for one, am proud when I simply manage to get myself to the farmers’ market before it closes. I get stressed out just thinking of buying a tomato plant and keeping it alive. Heather, on the other hand, goes foraging and dumpster diving for food instead of buying the stuff, and urges you not just to buy a tomato plant, but to hook up with a broader gardening community to get clippings and seeds to avoid having to buy starter plants altogether.

That said, Heather continuously talks about finding solutions that work for you as an individual, and as a member of a specific, individuated community. There’s no moralizing indictment for your personal choice, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that Heather recommends.

And if gardening sounds like a whole lot of work, you’ll be surprised to read the many passages in Food Not Lawns that emphasize R&R. The idea here’s NOT to add a whole lot of gardening and activist obligations on top of an already-demanding lifestyle, but instead to rethink one’s lifestyle to simplify it and make it more enjoyable. Much of the advice has to do with finding creative ways to opt out of of the usual work-earn-spend cycle by choosing to reduce, reuse, recycle, and share instead.

Hear Heather Flores discuss and sign her book at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., in Pasadena on Thursday, May 17, 2007, at 7 pm.

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