The cynical answer would be “so you can out-snob the snobs who buy all their produce at Whole Foods”, but I can come up with a less cynical answer.

Assume that in the long run, rising oil prices and what-not are going to make food more expensive and, in general, degrade your standard of living.

Then it makes a certain amount of sense to get in on the backyard-gardening thing now and invest the necessary money and effort into improving your soil, figuring out what kinds of plants work there and what doesn’t work, etc., so that you actually have something useful by the time the Apocalypse hits.

It makes not quite so much sense to hire someone else to do all this work for you, but, well, if your gardener moves to Oregon to escape the Apocalypse maybe he’ll at least leave you all his notes.

Of course, if I were thinking about the Apocalypse, I wouldn’t want to live in a part of the continent whose residents depended on faraway sources for fresh water. So maybe we’re back to the snobbery explanation. Or maybe I, as a New Englander, am just more of a snob than all the Californians.

A quote comes to mind:

"[She] lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side."

    -- Terry Pratchett, in "Men at Arms"

It says that more people are getting into this line of work because they have lost their jobs in the recession, not because they want to grow cheaper food at home that actually costs a lot more than Whole Foods.

People who can spend $1675 a year on having someone else grow their produce for them are probably a lot less likely to have been affected by the recession.