I grow somewhere between 22 and 24 tomato plants every summer. Four or five varieties, none of them Romas (they sulk in the Pacific Northwest, in my opinion, and I’ve stopped giving them the chance). In a good year that adds up to over a hundred pounds of tomatoes.

From all of that, I end up with about two quarts of salsa and a gallon of tomato sauce.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. A good chunk of the hundred pounds never makes it to the kitchen. It gets eaten warm off the vine, sliced onto a plate with a little salt, tossed into whatever’s for dinner that night. Still. Two quarts. And the salsa isn’t just tomatoes. The Anaheims and jalapeños come out of the same garden, so those jars hold most of the back half of the yard.

Most of a tomato is water, and most of putting one up is cooking that water away. I knew that, sort of, the way I know a lot of things I’ve never had to do myself. After a few seasons of standing over a pot watching it cook down to a fraction of itself, I know it differently.

I don’t look at the canned food aisle the same way anymore. I understand economies of scale. A cannery isn’t working one pot at a time on the back of a stove. But the content-to-can ratio doesn’t care how big the operation is. Somebody grew all those pounds to fill all those cans. Multiply that by every can on the shelf, then by every shelf in every store. I’ve tried doing that math standing there with my cart, and my brain just quits.

Then there are the ingredients none of us can pronounce. Nothing in my jars needs a chemistry degree to read. I won’t pretend to know what all those other things are doing in there. I only know mine get along fine without them.

Tomatoes aren’t the only lesson. I’ve processed chickens twice. I didn’t like it much, and I’ll save the details for another day, but it was the same lesson with feathers. Food doesn’t arrive as food. A lot of work happens between the living thing and the package, and most of us (me included, before) never have to think about it.

Seeds turned out to be their own small revelation. I save what I can: radish, lettuce, flowers. One radish plant left to bolt makes thousands of seeds. Thousands. Meanwhile the seed company would like $4 or $5 for a packet of fifty. I know there’s more to producing seed than letting a radish go to flower in the corner of a bed, but still. Somebody in that industry is doing very well. I don’t bother saving squash or cucumber seeds. They cross-pollinate with whatever’s growing nearby, and next year’s plant is a crapshoot. Those I’ll keep buying.

The compost pile feeds the soil, the soil feeds the plants, and the plants feed the frogs. Well, the bugs on the plants feed the frogs. The frogs came back this year, and they moved into the basil, the raspberries, and the zinnias. They’re better pest control than anything I could buy, and a lot more fun to find. They’re no help at all against Roadie, who eats the pea blossoms before they ever get the chance to become peas. That pest wears a harness and sits on command.

My mother and grandmother both gardened, and seriously, so I didn’t come by this out of nowhere. I’ve always liked the idea of the victory garden, a yard that does a job. Ours isn’t fancy. It isn’t built for lounging, and nobody’s going to photograph it for a magazine. But it produces, and it feeds my husband and me for a good part of the year. The zinnias are there because I want them there.

What I keep coming back to is simpler than any of the math. I know I can do this. I know what went into the jar because I put it there, and I know what went into the soil because I put that there too. It’s a quiet sort of satisfaction, and I’ll take it.