Eight years ago, 52-year-old flight attendant Louise Tremblay thought she had finally found her dream home tucked into the woods in the Quebec countryside. But, as she attempted to draw a relaxing bath her first night in the house, she realized quickly that something was amiss. The tub filled a scant two inches and she realized to her horror that she had poured her entire life's savings into a home with no viable source of water. The house, as it turned out, had been built atop an old garbage dump.

The nearest neighbor was unwilling to work with her to fix the shared, faulty well and city officials would not allow her to dig a new one. Drained of financial resources, she looked around to take stock of her surroundings. "I had my garden to keep me alive," she said. "I had my vegetable garden to keep me healthy."
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There are lots of reasons to grow your own food. It’s cheaper, safer, healthier, better for the environment, and even reduces stress.

So this year, we challenge you to grow one thing for your dinner table: Herb, vegetable, fruit … just one thing that you cultivate yourself.

Whether you're using a rooftop, countertop, or community garden, if you're blessed with full sun or none, we invite you to join the iReport kitchen garden club - and chronicle your successes and foibles through photos and video.

We'll all learn together.

Let's get started! See the garden assignment on iReport.
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Too broke? Too busy? Too...nope. We're having none of that. This is the year you garden.

Watch Eatocracy on CNN Newsroom every Wednesday at 12:45 ET.

Eatocracy's Managing Editor Kat Kinsman attempts to vegetable garden on a roof deck in Brooklyn, NY in USDA Hardiness Zone 6b. Feel free to taunt, advise or encourage her efforts as this series progresses.

This year, you'll grow your own food. Not all of it and probably not even most or much of it. But you'll grow some, and that's going to change your life.

There are plenty of reasons to do this. Andrew Zimmern told us just this week that. "If everyone grew what they could, supported urban farms and community gardens in cities and local CSAs, the pressure relief on our overtaxed system would be immense. The resulting dollar shift would be staggering and deliver a positive shot in the arm to local economies. Our food would also be safer. Small action here can yield tremendous impact, immediately."

That's awfully compelling - and pretty intense. Perhaps start small. Grow an herb you are sick of having to pay money for at a store. Grow a vegetable that reminds you of how a grandparent's kitchen smelled. Grow a fruit you always want to have at your fingertips. Grow an ingredient that will make your sauce, stew, soup or salad taste the way it did when you had it at that little cafe in Rome, France, Mexico City or Des Moines.
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Arugula, radishes, kale, pomegranates, persimmons, figs and quince – these are just some of the varieties of produce tended by students at Burgess-Peterson Elementary school, an urban school on the east side of Atlanta.

When the garden started three years ago, students hadn't even heard of – much less grown and eaten – a lot of the food now grown on school grounds.

And yet on the day CNN visited the school, fifth-graders ate quiche made with fresh spinach from the school garden, and fourth-graders chomped happily on slices of persimmon, an unusual orange-colored fruit, harvested from the school's fruit orchard.

You'd be surprised, said fifth-grade teacher Megan Kiser, what foods students are willing to try if they grow it themselves.
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5@5 is a daily, food-related list from chefs, writers, political pundits, musicians, actors, and all manner of opinionated people from around the globe.

Excess herbs - there are worse problems to have. But when you've gone to the trouble of growing them in boxes on a rooftop in the middle of a busy city, you want to make sure you use them to their fullest potential.

Scott Walton, executive chef at Markethouse Restaurant in Chicago specializes in fresh, locally sourced ingredients - some grown mere feet above diners' heads - and it's his mission to make sure every bit of it is sufficiently savored.

C'mon - thyme's a wasting!

Five Ways to Use Herbs Year 'Round: Scott Walton
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Eatocracy's Managing Editor Kat Kinsman attempts to vegetable garden on a roof deck in Brooklyn, NY in USDA Hardiness Zone 6b. Feel free to taunt, advise or encourage her efforts as this series progresses.

This morning, I stood on my roof deck and made my African Guinea Flint corn have sex with itself.

Some folks knit, ride dirt bikes or collect small, disturbingly lifelike figurines of a baby Lord Voldemort. I get my kicks from raising heirloom vegetables.

The process isn't always quite so hands-on. Mostly, it's just a matter of sticking seeds or shoots in dirt, fertilizing, watering and presto - potatoes, tomatoes and radishes as far as the eye can see. And if you have the acreage, corn would probably not require the services of a social director.
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Eatocracy's Managing Editor Kat Kinsman attempts to vegetable garden on a roof deck in Brooklyn, NY in USDA Hardiness Zone 6b. Feel free to taunt, advise or encourage her efforts as this series progresses.

My edible loofah won't fruit, and there doesn't seem to be a darned thing I can do about it. For that matter, I can't stave off daikon bolt, keep my African Guinea Flint corn from slumping or save my white bush scallop squash from the indignity of slug consumption.

This is mostly my fault, and I have to live with it. I could have just laid down to drown in a deluge of Netflix-streamed episodes of Battlestar Galactica, taken up yogalates or just napped like a normal person, but no, not me. As a friend recently pointed out to me, I use any scrap of down time I have to assign myself an extra job.
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Eatocracy's Managing Editor Kat Kinsman attempts to vegetable garden on a roof deck in Brooklyn, NY in USDA Hardiness Zone 6b. Feel free to taunt, advise or encourage her efforts as this series progresses.

This may seem like small potatoes to you, but I managed to grow some spuds on my own at home. On a roof deck. In Brooklyn.

I know I shouldn't be admitting this in public, but I'd honestly had no idea how potatoes...happen. Sure, I'd seen seed potatoes at the garden center and had a vague memory of an elementary school project involving sprouting eyes. I pieced together that they need the soil scrubbed from their skin, and that there's some sort of blight-prone leaf, but the mechanics of tater gestation had somehow escaped me.
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Though President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel delved into classic Washington fare during their two hour meal Monday night at 1789 Restaurant in the historic Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, tonight's State Dinner, will celebrate all things fresh and new - with a sweet nod to the honored guest's homeland.

From the menu provided by the White House:

A Spring Harvest Dinner
The State Dinner for Germany will celebrate the first harvest of the spring. Many of the vegetables and herbs used to prepare this evening’s dinner came from the White House Kitchen Garden. This garden was created by Mrs. Obama in March of 2009 and has become a central hub for activities here at the White House. In the early spring of this year, students from Tubman Elementary and Bancroft Elementary Schools in Washington DC planted vegetables in the White House Kitchen Garden. On June 3rd, only four days shy of the State Dinner, American Indian children joined the First Lady to plant traditional Native American crops and also harvested these vegetables just in time for the dinner.

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