Gardens with a 12,000-person waiting list

I think you under-estimate the pesticide regimen comerical farms use (I doubt your neighborhood gardener could get there hands on some of them). Though you are probably correct, small gardens aren't really an efficient way to grow food.

I'm not a farmer but this description of farming from the end of last century stuck in my mind.

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-t...

"I asked him to walk me through a season's regimen. It typically begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide -- Sencor or Eptam -- to ''clean'' his field of all weeds. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time to control weeds.

Idaho farmers like Forsyth farm in vast circles defined by the rotation of a pivot irrigation system, typically 135 acres to a circle; I'd seen them from 30,000 feet flying in, a grid of verdant green coins pressed into a desert of scrubby brown. Pesticides and fertilizers are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth's farm draws most of its water from the nearby Snake River. Along with their water, Forsyth's potatoes may receive 10 applications of chemical fertilizer during the growing season. Just before the rows close -- when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next -- he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, one of the biggest threats to the potato crop. (Late blight, which caused the Irish potato famine, is an airborne fungus that turns stored potatoes into rotting mush.) Blight is such a serious problem that the E.P.A. currently allows farmers to spray powerful fungicides that haven't passed the usual approval process. Forsyth's potatoes will receive eight applications of fungicide.

Twice each summer, Forsyth hires a crop duster to spray for aphids. Aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leafroll virus, which in Russet Burbank potatoes causes net necrosis, a brown spotting that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. It happened to Forsyth last year. ''I lost 80,000 bags'' -- they're a hundred pounds each -- ''to net necrosis,'' he said. ''Instead of getting $4.95 a bag, I had to take $2 a bag from the dehydrator, and I was lucky to get that.'' Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect; yet because big buyers like McDonald's believe (with good reason) that we don't like to see brown spots in our fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

''Monitor is a deadly chemical,'' Forsyth said. ''I won't go into a field for four or five days after it's been sprayed -- even to fix a broken pivot.'' That is, he would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause neurological damage.

The land is owned by an association which leases it out to members; everything on top (house, trees and other plants) is owned by the gardener. So there's a transfer of ownership when a lot frees up, but the market is highly regulated so you can't just outbid everyone else to get a garden faster.

You're making a huge number of assumptions, both about gardening and about farming.

1. Not everyone uses those pots, and there are lots of alternatives. Many serious gardeners start from seed. Also, you provide no actual analysis of how much waste these contribute relative to vegetable farms + shipping + supermarkets, which also involves a lot of plastic.

2. Peat is terrible, and also totally unnecessary. What's needed here is regulation.

3. Expensive, perhaps. Claiming that farms use surface water is simply untrue. Try flying over the American west some time: those little circles are often the result of depleting ground water and pumping it onto the arid ground. Both gardens and farms can be far more water efficient than they currently are (personally I use salvaged mulch and drip irrigation), but farming is currently crazily unsustainable water-wise, both in terms of consumption and contamination.

It is definitely, definitely possible to garden in an environmentally positive way. Almost everything used can be reused or obtained from other sources (single use food plastic is great for seed starting), pests can be managed at a small scale without pesticides, and efficient water practices are easy. It's also easier to incorporate efficient perrenial crops at a small scale.

Also, there are second order effects to be considered in connecting people to their food systems. Nobody notices if the far away farm providing their veggies is operating responsibly, but growing their own or getting involved with urban growers lets them see the process up close and be connected to it.

The math on pesticides shouldn't be too hard. Take the amount of pesticides sold to residential consumers and device by the total acreage for home gardens, which should be some percentage of all residential land. Commercial farms certainly do use lots of chemicals, but per-acre I suspect that many lawns use more. While they may get numerically fewer treatments, a commercial operator spreads the stuff very thinly. (And one can debate whether the chlorine in municipal water supplies should count.)

I got "fuddy-duddy", so presumably it was seen as an old (or old-fashioned) person's hobby.