Producing vegetables in your own yard is less hard on the planet than growing those vegetables commercially, right?

Maybe not, according to a recent study comparing urban gardens to conventional farms. Turns out that for each vegetable grown, those urban gardens typically made a much larger contribution to greenhouse gas pollutants. It’s also clear that the vegetables produced in those urban gardens would often be much more expensive to produce than what you could buy from the grocery.

Why that would be the case is an important lesson in how we’ve needlessly made our home gardens more complicated, more expensive, and – yes – more polluting.