My Vegetable Love offers a detailed daily record of gardenng, loving, and living during a single growing season—from the first outdoor planting in early spring to the final fall harvest shortly after Thanksgiving. Yet Klaus describes far more than the toils and triumphs of tending vegetables, as his observations encompass the day-to-day changes in weather and wildlife as well as the life changes in his pets, his wife, and himself. As Patricia Hampl wrote, “Beneath the simplicity of this beguiling gardener's journal lies the captivating story of good life and true love. In the spirit of M. F. K. Fisher's writing about food and drink, Carl Klaus has found in his garden a model of the enduring passions of life and death.”

Carl H. Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and coeditor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction, is a diarist, essayist, and author or coauthor of several textbooks on writing. His nonfiction includes My Vegetable Love (Iowa paperback 2000) and its companion Weathering Winter (Iowa, 1997) as well as Taking Retirement: A Beginner’s Diary and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (Iowa, 2006).