Wendy Gordon, General Manager, National Geographic's TheGreenGuide.com

There's no place I'd rather be in July than our garden.

I feel pretty lucky to have this garden, all 40 x 30 square feet of it, which is just a couple dozen yards from a 100+ year-old farmhouse we have in the western Catskills. It produces an abundance of vegetables from early June through late September. There's no evidence proving that locally grown is better for you, or "more nutritionally complete," but no group of scientists are needed to inform me that my fresh-from-the-garden vegetables taste a whole lot better than those that have shipped thousands of miles from farm to fork.

I also like that I haul my dinner greens to the kitchen myself -- no car, not even a bag. According to Joan Gussow, Columbia University nutritionist, shipping a strawberry from California to New York requires 435 calories of fossil fuel but provides the eater with only 5 calories of nutrition.

Gardening is something my husband and I enjoy. The kids seem to always disappear when it's time to plant, mulch, or weed. But they are always at the ready when harvest time comes around, which starts early in our garden --when perennials, including rhubarb and asparagus, come bursting through the cool soil at the same time we're planting the first early season peas, beans and lettuce seeds -- and runs pretty much straight through October.

Our approach to gardening is a bit haphazard, but we have gotten better at picking seeds that are right for our region. Most catalogs offer a zone chart and other keys; Seeds of Change has the best charts among the catalogs we get, showing how much sun and water certain plants need and in which zone they are best suited.

Then there is the matter of which seeds to choose. We're not purists about it, but we do try to buy organic seeds whenever there is an option. Conventional seeds might have been harvested from chemically grown plants, and they also may have been treated with insecticides or fungicides prior to sale. We also try heirloom varieties that are from our region whenever we come across them. Even the major seed catalogs, such as Burbee, offer a number of organic and heirloom varieties.

You don't need a big yard or even a yard to plant a garden. A small potted garden on a terrace or sunny apartment window sill can provide a year round bounty. As part of my work on The Green Guide, we've come up with lots of tips on starting a vegetable garden, including a list of companies offering organic and heirloom seeds.