A few weeks ago, I was asked if I would like to review a children’s book called “Holly Bloom’s Garden.” I don’t review much on here these days as I am rather busy with my other job, but this one I agreed to.  The story is about a little girl named Holly who is having troubles in the garden.  I thought that maybe someday a little girl might come to visit who would like to read about gardens.

The children that go through the foster care system can technically be from all walks of life. But in reality, many are from very poor homes. And when I mean poor, I mean both financially and emotionally. A common misconception is that kids who end up in “the system” are there because of abuse. This is incorrect. Many end up there due to neglect. They are children that no one cares for. They often arrive at their foster homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. This is why there are pretty dresses and clothes in the room. Many most likely never had nice clothes, let alone a pretty dress.

The book Holly Bloom’s Garden, a little girl in a loving family takes care of a garden and fails. Still, she is loved and through the love of her family, she finds a way to succeed. The book is beautifully illustrated with scenes that are seemingly realistic with lush gardens full of flowers, then you realize things like that daffodils and foxglove are not often found blooming at the same time.  But that is not the point. This is a child’s fantasy of a garden and the book is a sweet portrayal of that garden.

To my future little girls, this book will seem even more fantastical. A little girl from a home with two parents, food on the table and clean. Where drugs are not an everyday fact of life. Never mind that there is a yard and the little girl tries to grow flowers in that yard. Gardens are so foreign to many of these children that they are not even comprehensible to their mind. But that is my job. My job is to show that, at least that while they are at my house, that houses like the one in Holly Bloom’s Garden exist and that they deserve it. It is my job to show them what a home and garden should be. And then send them back to their home.  And they may go back and find that their home has changed for the better. Or they may find that it has not changed at all.

Someday, one of these girls will go home with the Holly Bloom’s Garden book tucked into her bag. It will be a possession for them and a fantasy, maybe. In the meantime, this book will sit in the empty room until the next little girl comes to visit.

If you have ever considered becoming a foster parent, I encourage you to look into it. It is a hard job with low pay, but so is being a parent in general. If you have room in your house and heart, consider doing it.  The need is great everywhere for foster parents.

If you have a little girl (or boy) who like to garden, these activities that go along with the book are helpful.

But, once in awhile I get a book that I would want to read regardless of whether it came in the mail for free or not. And last week, that is exactly what happened. A small packaged arrived and the book inside looked just AWESOME.

“How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack” is the title of the book, with a cover that recalls the cover of Gnomes book that I loved so much as a child (and still occasionally pull that much battered copy out today to read a page or so to my own kids). Having read and very much enjoyed such other survival manuals as “The Zombie Survival Guide” and “Guide to Pirate Parenting” and “The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook”, I knew this was right up my alley.

The premise of the book is simple. You are in danger. You are about to die. Your adversary –garden gnomes. Your only hope – advanced preparation, diligence and a healthy amount of paranoia.

The book is a fun tongue in cheek look at gnomes as the enemy, and would be quite fun for any gardener to read. It is a light read and filled with delightfully demonic photographs of rampaging, blissful garden gnomes. This is a classic “gift” book (just in time for Christmas) with eye candy pictures galore, breezy, fun content and a topic that just the title will amuse the recipient. Buy a half dozen and give them to all your gardening friends as gifts for a bit of a giggle.

And *BONUS*, I got to interview the author, Chuck Sambuchino (certified GDE – Gnome Defense Expert). Here is the transcript from that:

Chuck: Garden gnomes just creep me the heck out. I find them oddly disturbing, and thought that if they bothered me in a such a way, certainly they bother many more people. It turns out I was right. And as the public begins to learn more of their treachery and skills with edged weapons, the tide is turning against popular support for the average garden gnome (gnome hortus).

Me: What is your preferred gnome fighting object?

Chuck: A plastic snow shovel. When you’re fighting in close quarters, you have to maximize each swing, and a large orange snow shovel does just that. As an advanced gnome defense expert, I also may sometimes bust out a sledgehammer, but those times are rare. (On a sidenote, I do not advise newbies use sledgehammers. They are difficult to aim at first and take 3-4 seconds to recycle a swing.)

Me: Which came first, the text in the book or the photos? (Both are great but I could almost see someone spending time taking demonic photos of gnomes and then trying to go back to write a book around them, so I just wondered)

Chuck: Great question, and the answer is text. I passed in all the text, and the photographer tried to pick out parts he thought would make a great visual complement. The photos, taken by perhaps the bravest man on earth, turned out fantastic.

Me: Why do you think so many people put garden gnomes in their gardens? Why gnomes? Why not puppies or pigs or something else? I have always wondered this. What’s your thoughts?

Chuck: Garden gnomes were discovered in the forest, so it’s a centuries-old tradition to associate them with the outdoors. I think they’re in gardens because this awful Travelocity PR campaign has made them out to be symbols of happiness and gaiety. But we all know they’re actually vicious killers. I think having some puppies in the garden sounds like a wonderful alternative then being stabbed to death in your bed the night the gnomes finally come for you (and they will).

Me: Do you see any other seemingly benign objects as being a threat and therefore a possible subject for a future book?

Chuck: Mwahahahahaha, I cannot reveal all my other book ideas. I will tell you that one of the most common questions I get is about the danger level of pink flamingos and lawn jockeys. Further study is needed, but preliminary reports show that flamingos are essentially harmless ornaments with pea-sized brains incapable of a planned attack. As far as lawn jockeys? The verdict is not yet in, which means I consider them deadly gnome allies until proven otherwise.

Other fun sources about this book:

Video:
Witness an actual gnome attack so that you can understand the danger:

Reviews on other blogs
Carpe Geum: How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack
Dead End Follies: Chuck Sambuchino – How To Survive A Garden Gnome Attack (2010)
From My Corner of Katy: Are You At Risk?
One Woman’s Garden: Gardeners Beware! You are warned!
An Interview with Chuck Sambuchino, Author of How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack

Can I say that I fell in love with book before I actually read it?  I watched it on TV as a young girl, as a Hallmark special. In my memory, it was well done (though I have not seen it since and back then I thought the A-Team was well done too so you can’t really trust my childhood perceptions) and I immediately looked for the book.

When I was 11 years old reading that book, the draw was the mystery and fantasy of The Secret Garden.  At that time, I could not have cared less about all the silly flowers in the garden.  I loved the fact that Mary, Dickon and Colin had the COOLEST secret clubhouse in the whole wide world.

Since then, I have read the book to each one of my boys and I am reading it to my youngest now, which is why it is on my mind.   I think they too love the fact that the children in the book have this place to go that the grown-ups don’t know about, a place where children could make things happen without the meddling of adults (and we meddle alot these days, you know).

As an adult, I am struck by how well Frances Hodgson Burnett captures the heart of a budding gardener or even a long time gardener who has been locked away for the winter.  While there are many passages in the book that convey this feeling, I love this one about when Mary first finds the garden:

“Yes, they are tiny growing things and they might be crocuses or snowdrops or daffodils,” she whispered.

She bent very close to them and sniffed the fresh scent of the damp earth. She liked it very much. “Perhaps there are some other ones coming up in other places,” she said. “I will go all over the garden and look.”

She did not skip, but walked. She went slowly and kept her eyes on the ground. She looked in the old border beds and among the grass, and after she had gone round, trying to miss nothing, she found ever so many more sharp, pale green points, and she had become quite excited again.

“It isn’t a quite dead garden,” she cried out softly to herself. “Even if the roses are dead, there are other things alive.”

She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to grow. She searched about until she found a rather sharp piece of wood and knelt down and dug and weeded out the weeds and grass until she made nice little clear places around them.

“Now they look as if they could breathe,” she said, after she had finished with the first ones. “I am going to do ever so many more. I’ll do all I can see. If I haven’t time today I can come tomorrow.”

She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass under the trees. The exercise made her so warm that she first threw her coat off, and then her hat, and without knowing it she was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.

Now tell me that is not exactly how you feel the first time you step outside into your garden after the wind, cold and snow of winter has receded.

Anyway, my point is that this winter, while you are huddled and miserable and gardenless in your house (or maybe that is just me), pick up a copy of The Secret Garden. Relive what it was like to be a child (without having to involve silly things like vampires and werewolves) and remember what it will be like to find your own “secret” garden in the spring.

Imagine a world where genetically modified plants are used as harrowing weapons that can kill entire populations – just so that a company can make more money.

Imagine a world where the equivalent of script kiddie hackers (for you not in the biz, these are amature hackers, like the graffiti vandals of the computer world) can “hack” a plant’s DNA and create deadly or frightening changes.

Then imagine trying to live an everyday life in this world.

This is the world created in the book The Windup Girl.

It was rather ironic that this book arrived at the library this weekend for me to pickup. I had ordered it weeks ago after it was recommended as an interesting read in the steampunk (though it’s more post apocalyptic cyberpunk, but whatever) genre. It was not mentioned to me that plants played such a vital role in the story. Considering that I wrote about heirlooms versus hybrids just a few days ago and that genetically modified crops are the next level in that discussion, it was a very timely and interesting read.

The jury is still out on my opinion on genetically modified plants, but this book did provide a lot to think about.

And while gardening specifically was not discussed in the book, there was some allusions to the idea that things grown simply for beauty were no longer possible and things grown at home to feed yourself were just downright dangerous to your health and general state of being alive.

Now imagine a world where you could not garden and you realize that this book is not just sci-fi but horror as well.

Regardless, an interesting read if you are looking for something to read and ponder this summer.

*Just a note – the book does contain certain amounts of graphic sexual violence as the main character is a genetically engineered “companion” turned sex slave. Just so that you know that ahead of time and don’t yell at me later for not warning.

This year, I was asked to review the Troy Bilt Super Bronco CRT Garden Tiller. And I will be honest, I did not use it myself.  I was afraid of it.  The thing is a beast, and in tough soil, I was fairly certain that I was going to lose control of it and take out a fence, a shrub and important pieces of my anatomy.

So, for the safety of myself and those around me, I let my husband use it and I will report his findings securely from  behind a computer screen.

To start off with, the tiller was bang easy to assemble. Pop the handle on and you are ready to go.  That being said, my husband thought that in terms of how well the tiller itself chewed through the soil, the handle felt a little flimsy.  But, being said after that, no matter how tough the ground was, there was never an issue.

We tilled my garden, which already has been broken in during past years with no problems.  The tiller moved smoothly.  I think that if I had this to do again, I would have gone with a slightly smaller tiller though.  I have raised beds and turning it around in those beds was a bit tricky sometimes. 

So we tried it next in my neighbor’s open garden. Again, soil that had been tilled before.  My husband loved that and turning was not a problem.

Then we took it to my friend’s “fire-sale, bought in a foreclosure action and the yard was abandoned a year before the house was” yard.  This was basically virgin, hard clay soil, and my husband had a blast.  It was like watching a cowboy ride a bronco.  The soil did its best to throw my husband and the tiller and my husband and the tiller handled it. The tiller chewed through the ground and left a lovely, smooth bed in its wake. 

All in all, we were impressed and pleased.

Then the tiller broke.  It seems the spring on the pull cord had snapped.  My hubby, being a hands on kind of guy, took the pull cord assembly apart and shook his head like a doctor who had lost the patient.  I called the company.  And to be very honest, they were quick like bunnies to get the tiller fixed for us.  No fuss, no questions and we were rolling (um, I mean tilling) again in no time.

All and all, I liked this tiller. My husband loved the tiller. And while it did break on the 3^rd time we used it, it gave me a chance to see their customer service in action, and they were very nice and prompt.

So the tiller is now at my in-laws and will then go to my husband’s grandparents and my other neighbor has asked if I could let them borrow it, just for an afternoon.  I am now officially the “friend with a tiller” which is the kind of friend with benefits that gardeners like.