garden writing

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Book Review: The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food

If you’re new to gardening, starting a garden can be quite intimidating. The learning curve can seem steep and the barriers to entry can feel vast. Having a beautiful, productive garden like those you might see around your neighborhood can seem like an unreachable goal. What isn’t obvious when encountering nice gardens are the mistakes made, the lessons learned, and the years of trial and error that brought the garden and gardener to where they are now. Even the most experienced gardeners continue to fail and learn from those failures, which is part of what makes gardening such an exciting pursuit. The looming question for beginners, though, is where do I start?

Luckily, resources abound for new gardeners – from countless books and magazines, to YouTube videos and podcasts, to university and college courses and degrees. Easily one of the best places to start if you live in the United States are extension services of land-grant colleges and universities. One of their main reasons for existence is to help people grow successful gardens. But while the dream of having a garden is exciting, the information one needs to absorb in order to get there can be overwhelming. Rote learning of basic instructions presented in a dry way can turn people off from wanting to proceed, which is why I find Joseph Tychonievich and Liz Anna Kozik’s recent book, The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food, so refreshing. Just about everything can be made more entertaining when presented in comic book form, and gardening tutorials are no exception.

As with most comic books, The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food tells a story. Mia is a computer programmer who lives next to George, an avid gardener. One day, Mia finds George having trouble sending photos to his grandchildren. Mia offers to help; George reluctantly accepts. In return, George gifts Mia a basket of spring greens and daffodils from his garden, which prompts Mia to share her dream of one day having a garden. George jumps at the opportunity to help, and thus begins a new friendship and yearlong mentorship as George helps Mia start her first garden.

George guides Mia along each step of the way – from choosing a location in her yard, to deciding what to plant and when, to helping her deal with pests and diseases, to knowing what and when to harvest, and to, finally, encouraging her to throw a garden party to share her bounty with friends. Much more is explained along the way, often with George starting the conversation with, “The #1 rule of gardening…”, and Mia cringing at yet another #1 rule to remember.

Planting too early can be deadly for frost sensitive plants. Don’t be fooled by fake spring.

The story is simple and easy to follow, and the information is basic but solid. There are greater details to explore, but for a beginning gardener, this book is an excellent starting point. The resource section at the end of the book will get the reader to those greater details when they’re ready. I found George’s harvesting guide particularly useful. As a gardener living in the semi-arid Intermountain West, I had to laugh when George claimed that some years he doesn’t water his garden at all. A vegetable garden in our climate typically wouldn’t survive long without regular, supplemental irrigation. However, if you live in a region that reliably receives rain in the summer, watering may be unnecessary. Thankfully, there is a “Cheat Sheet” included in the book with a great flowchart to help you determine if and when to water.

Joseph provided the text for this book and is a skilled garden communicator, something he’s been doing for much of his life. Without his words, this book would not be the stand-out resource that it is. However, it was Liz’s artwork that sold me on this book. Having followed her work on twitter for a while now, I was thrilled to learn she had a book out. Much like Joseph’s lessons in gardening, Liz’s artwork is simple and approachable, yet accurate enough to recognize exactly what plant is being represented even without the finer details found in the botanical illustrations of many field guides. This book is honestly worth having just to be able to hold in your hands a collection of Liz’s beautiful artwork.

A selection of easy herbs to grow from The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food

Buy the book, but also check out the personal websites of the author and illustrator:

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Book Review: Grow Curious

In the early 2000’s when I was really getting excited about learning how to garden, one of the first resources I turned to was a website called You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail. I probably saw it mentioned in a zine about gardening. Something about it felt very punk rock. Trail’s site was different than other resources, and it spoke to the anti-authoritarian, non-conformist in me. Reading through the About page today, Trail’s punk rock spirit hasn’t waned, and I can see why her site appealed to me.

Now with well over two decades of gardening experience to draw from, Trail continues to run her site, has written five books (including one called You Grow Girl), and her “contemporary, laid-back approach” to gardening remains essentially the same. In her words, she “places equal importance on environmentalism, style, affordability, art, and humour.” Her “aim has always been to promote exploration, excitement, and a d.i.y approach to growing plants without the restrictions of traditional ideas about gardening.” We share these sentiments, which is why when I learned of her most recent book, Grow Curious, I knew I needed to read it.

Grow Curious by Gayla Trail accompanied by a pressed leaf from Trail’s garden.

Grow Curious is an activity book for gardeners of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels. It diverges from most books about gardening in that it is not a how-to or a what-to-plant-where guide. It is instructional, but only in ways that are less about getting our chores done and more about helping us explore our gardens in order to see them in a new light and open our eyes to the remarkable world that is right outside our door – a world often overlooked because we have work to do. Trail’s book is also meant to reinvigorate any of us that may be a bit disillusioned by the act of gardening – having misplaced our spark along the way, lost in the drudgery of it all. It’s about stopping for a minute, looking around, and seeing things we maybe haven’t noticed before but that have been there all along.

Because Grow Curious is a compilation of garden activities (“an invitation to play”) interspersed with prose, there is no need to consume it chronologically. Activities can be done in order or chosen at random. They can be skipped altogether or done at different times of the year. The book, however, is organized by season, starting in spring and ending in winter. In this way, the story of the birth and death of the garden is told, a polarity that Trail reflects on throughout the book. In the introduction to “Fall,” she writes of the growing season coming to a close and the garden becoming “a scene of decay.” The garden’s death can help us come to terms with other deaths, including our own. On a brighter side, the return of spring can bring a newfound sense of “hope, transformation, and optimism;” along with “the energy of renewal.”

Botanical rubbings – one of dozens of creative, garden activities found in Grow Curious by Gayla Trail

The bulk of this book is a series of activities that are meant to, as the subtitle proclaims, “cultivate joy, wonder, and discovery in your garden.” In general, the instructions are minimal – a short paragraph or two; a single sentence followed by a list of things to observe or do. In this way, you have the freedom to explore and make things up as you go, without worrying about rules or whether or not you are doing it right. Activities include touching an insect, observing the shapes of leaves and stems, smelling soil, taking pictures from new and unusual angles, visiting your garden in the dead of night, et cetera. Some activities are more involved, like raising a caterpillar or researching something to death. Other activities require little effort, like pulling up some plants to see what color their roots are or tasting an edible plant part that you have never tasted before. To facilitate advanced exploration, many of the activities include ideas or ways to “Go Further.”

Among the pages of activities are Trail’s musings on gardening and life (as it relates to gardening), and I found these to be equally intriguing.  Like her thoughts on fear and insecurity: “I was inexperienced and uncertain, full of my own fears and excuses.” And her “balanced” view on pests in the garden: “Since our insect partners often depend on the so-called bad guys, it turns out that a balanced garden needs both.” Her encouragement to observe the differences between wild plants and weeds that grow within and beyond the borders of our gardens, and her plea for us to “invite wildness” in, noting the “knotty labyrinth” that exists between “wild” and “cultivated” – “social constructs that we place in opposition to each other.”

Orange roots of California poppy (Eschscholzia californica). “As you’re digging up, moving around, and planting out new crops, trees, bushes, and perennials this fall, take note of plants that have colourful roots.” — Gayla Trail

If you have been following Awkward Botany for a while, you can probably see why this book is right up my alley. If you enjoy reading Awkward Botany, this book should be right up your alley, too.