While most homeowners are opting for less landscape and more cement, 51-year-old Garrison says urban gardening is the perfect counterbalance to the valley's hectic pace.

"Most things that are home grown are so much better than store bought; when I go to the store, I never buy plums, apricots, peaches," says Garrison, pointing out a few of the 80 varieties of fruit that grow on her quarter-acre. "Occasionally you'll find a good peach, but most of the time they don't taste the way I know they can taste."

Thirty-one years ago, the Palo Alto native took a break from college and headed East to visit a relative. While passing through the West, Garrison fell in love with Oregon and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to rent a cabin on 300 acres of farmland. For two years, she and three friends paid $40 a month for rent and learned the meaning of self-sufficiency.

"We grew our own food, hunted, fished, and lived without electricity," Garrison says. "We weren't completely self-sufficient, but we learned about it."

Afterwards, Garrison was "absolutely hooked and never retreated from an ever-growing, deeply passionate love for gardening," she says.

She came back to California to study agriculture at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and earned a bachelor's degree in crop science in 1978.

Now a guest lecturer, a farm advisor and founder of the Master Gardeners program at the University of California Cooperative Extension, Garrison understands how hard it can be to find the time for labor intensive hobbies.

"I'd rather put another plant in the ground than spend my time rooting out the weeds," says Garrison.

Until harvest season in fall, Garrison says she must spend an estimated four hours a day four days a week working in the garden. But when fall finally rolls around, the plants will require only half that time to bloom, meaning some downtime for Garrison.

And, Garrison says, if she can find the energy to garden a quarter-acre of vegetables, plus a well-grafted fruit orchard, anyone can maintain a small garden.

"We live on the best soil on this planet Earth," she says. "There are some places in Willow Glen where top soil has been known to be 20 feet deep."

Unfortunately, Santa Clara is in the last stages of urbanization, and Garrison fears that small-scale farming is becoming a lost art form. Through her work as a master gardener, she hopes to persuade more residents to garden.

For a beginning gardener, Garrison has one piece of key advice: "Start small, with a 3-foot-by-3-foot plot, and just make sure that the soil is moist enough."

Garrison also recommends soaking the plot with a pair of sprinklers for two or three days before planting.

After the soil has been irrigated, Garrison says, a beginner should start by planting easy-growing vegetables such as string beans or zucchini because they offer "instant gratification." Then gardeners can progress into higher-maintenance vegetables like tomatoes.

In the end, Garrison says, growing your own produce is just as much about spiritual health as it is about physical health.

"It's about feeling connected to something greater and more powerful than yourself," she says. "It's seeing a single vine of passion fruit break through a 4-inch slab of concrete. It's inspiring."