Whenever my neighbor Bob sees me lugging barrels of grass clippings and manure uphill to the garden, he can’t resist making a crack.

“You know, they sell fresh vegetables at the store,” he’ll say.

Usually, I don’t reply with a rhapsodic response extolling the virtues of growing your own, because I confess there are times that I see the wisdom of Bob’s remarks (even if he doesn’t really mean to be taken seriously).

The point is, no matter how satisfying, successful gardening can be laborious, what with all the digging, cultivating, hoeing, composting, weeding, mulching and watering.

Sure, you can buy a plant, stick it in the ground, sprinkle it every so often, and wind up with a handful of plump, juicy tomatoes that appear tantalizingly delicious until you discover disgusting, green worms crawling out of holes in the skin that look like something from the movie “Alien.”

Or you can grow an heirloom variety indoors from seed starting in late winter; move them to a cold frame or greenhouse; perform a PH test of the soil and make appropriate adjustments by adding lime or composted oak leaves; carefully transplant it adjacent to a stake or in a cage after the threat of frost has passed; install an automatic watering system; apply organic fertilizer; mulch it with a combination of seaweed and salt hay; prune it by tenderly pinching the lower suckers; and finally wind up with the same plump, juicy tomatoes riddled with the same disgusting, green worms.

Seriously, though, most of the time, such relatively low-maintenance crops as tomatoes and kale are so simple to grow I wonder why everybody doesn’t have a few plants. Heck, you don’t even need a garden — you can grow ’em in a pot on your deck, driveway or balcony.

Zucchini is another vegetable anybody can produce from seed, and a single plant can yield enough to supply a family of 11 and then some. The old joke is that, in many small towns, the only time people lock their car doors is during zucchini harvest.

Problems can develop when gardeners, emboldened by their success with zucchini, decide to move on to more challenging vegetables, such as cauliflower, which requires that its stems be bent and leaves tied to cover the head; eggplant, which attract a Pandora’s box of destructive insects; or muskmelon, which take up a lot of room, soak up a lot of water, need a lot of sun, and also tempt a lot of pests.

I no longer grow any of those delectable crops, having learned my lesson the hard way.

By far the easiest to grow, aside from weeds, is garlic, which is why more than 250 bulbs take up about a quarter of my garden. I plant cloves in the fall, cover them with compost and shredded leaves, and then I never need to water or weed them after they pop up the following spring. Right now, we’re chowing down on garlic scapes, or stalky seed pods; in a few weeks, I’ll be pulling up the whole bulbs. You can only eat so much garlic, though, so I give a fair amount of it away, store some in a cool, dry spot, save some to replant in the fall, and use the rest to ward off vampires.

This year, I’m also anticipating a bumper crop of potatoes, which are similarly simple to grow but are especially productive if you take the time to plant them in furrows and then add compost and mulch once shoots appear, a process known as “hilling.”

My rule of thumb is there’s no such thing as too much mulch, so, for the past several weeks, I’ve been hauling barrels of grass clippings 100 yards uphill over rocky trails to the garden. If I ever start another garden, it will be downhill from the driveway, or at least at the same level.

I collect clippings from the fields Bob mows, and then I haul the barrels half a dozen at a time in a cart to the start of my stone stairway and trail system. It takes more than an hour to transport each cartload to the garden; I’ve brought up several dozen loads so far.

While out for a morning run the other day, I stopped to chat with another neighbor who has donkeys and a horse.

“What do you do with all the manure?” I asked.

“Bag it and drive it by truck to my parents’ farm,” she replied.

“I can take it off your hands, if you like,” I offered.

“How much do you want?”

“As much as you can spare.”

I may come to regret this proposition because I discovered that bags of manure are considerably heavier than barrels of grass clippings. So far, I’ve dragged up a dozen or so bags, which I empty into a compost heap next to the garden and cover with crushed leaves. I should mention that I also collect bags of leaves from several neighbors; some even drop their bags off in my driveway.

All our vegetable scraps go into this mix and by next spring rich compost will be ready to spread on a new batch of crops.

Anyway, I’ve done some rough calculations and compute that if I paid myself a minimum wage for all my garden-related toils, each tomato would be worth $847, give or take a few bucks.

This sum amortizes the labor costs involved in the construction of a deer fence sufficiently sturdy to withstand a herd of bison, along with bird netting to repel flocks of greedy cardinals, catbirds and crows lurking around my blueberry patch.

Yes, it would be simpler and cheaper to buy produce in a store, but to borrow a phrase from a credit card commercial, the value of savoring home-grown veggies: priceless.

Another fun run

In last week’s column about free fun runs in the area, I neglected to mention that the Groton Town Recreation Department sponsors free summer fun runs at 6 p.m. Fridays at Bluff Point State Park. There’s a 0.4-mile run for children, as well as a 2.8-mile run from the parking lot to the beach and back, and a 3.5-mile loop on trails around the perimeter.

Those who donate $5 to a special needs program receive a pair of red Speed Laces and are eligible for additional prizes, including live lobsters from Abbott’s in Noank.