Book Review Section(Page 8)

This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader

By Joan Dye Gussow

273 pp.

Chelsea Green Publishing Company $22.95

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Gardening at our house still feels like a perennial act of reclamation. Perhaps it always will. Every year I imagine that the work we did in the vegetable beds last summer and fall will make it possible to plant that much sooner in the spring, and yet every May and June I feel as though I am retaking territory I had already won, and late in doing so, to boot. The problem isn't usually weeds or the snow-matted cornstalks I thought I'd gathered in November. The problem is ambition and a taste for ingenuity. The area under cultivation is always increasing, and in the established beds I seem to give in to diverging urges -- to garden as intensively and organically as I can and to give more and more formality to the look of the beds themselves. Not long ago, I planted a Union Jack of leeks and salad greens, a pleasingly futile gesture.

So I've derived a lot of solace this spring from Joan Dye Gussow's THIS ORGANIC LIFE: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader (Chelsea Green, $22.95). On the surface, Gussow is a hardheaded practitioner of common sense, a respected writer on nutrition and health and a great believer in the necessity, as well as the practice, of eating locally grown foods. But scratch the surface and what you also find in Gussow is an unhesitating romantic. After living in a house in Congers, N.Y., for 36 years, she and her husband, Alan, bought a converted Odd Fellows hall on a narrow lot sloping down to the Hudson River in

Piermont. They bought it for the light. Reclaiming the property was a blissful nightmare. Halfway through restoring the house, the Gussows discovered it needed to be torn down. When the vegetable beds were at their height, the Hudson rose and carried them away. In the midst of it all, Alan Gussow died. His death comes as a shock, a measure of the reader's unusual involvement in the lives of this gardening couple.

But Joan Gussow is an indomitable reclaimer. For her, gardening is literally an act of reclamation, restoring an overgrown site to productivity, rebalancing, if only on a small scale, an agriculture that is out of whack, reviving a life that must have faltered sadly when her husband died. It's very rare to be moved by a gardening book, but ''This Organic Life'' has an uncommon depth of feeling, not in the prose, which is plain-speaking, and not in its philosophical aspirations, which are more economic than spiritual. There is something happily, almost chaotically jumbled -- and thus lifelike -- about the way this book proceeds: a flood, a recipe, a death, a recipe, a community garden, a recipe. What ties it all together isn't merely Gussow's passion for making herself useful. It's her understanding that ''the production and consumption of fresh local food is so rich an experience for me that I find it hard to imagine how I would live if I couldn't grow what I eat and eat what I grow.''

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