Title: This Is a Gardening Show (Season 1)
Director: Brook Linder
Starring: Zach Galifianakis
Producer: Chris Kim
Publisher: Netflix
Genre: Non-Fiction, Contemporary, Historical
Rating: 3 Stars (6 on IMDB)
Reviewed by AstilbeFollows Zach Galifianakis as he approaches gardening with curiosity and self-effacing humor, blending comedy with appreciation for the planet while providing accessible tools and tips.
The future is filled with plants of all sizes, shapes, and colors.
I loved Zack’s sense of humor in this series. Whether he was asking kids about whether tomatoes were a fruit or a vegetable or joking about placing bets about what color certain potatoes would be before they were dug up, he brought so much laughter to topics like climate change and sustainable farming that wouldn’t generally be thought of as funny. Some of the points he made about what our future will look like if we don’t change how we grow our food were quite serious, so it was helpful to have those moments bookmarked by plenty of laughs along the way.
Each episode was about fifteen minutes long which unfortunately didn’t leave much space for exploring their topics in depth. I think twenty-five to thirty minutes would have been a better length, especially when Zach and his guests began talking about the history of agriculture and how certain wild foods have changed over the millennia thanks to selective breeding that are difficult to distill into a few short sentences.
Speaking of the historical segments, they were by far my favorite portions of these episodes. For example, wealthy Victorians thought that tomatoes were poisonous, and their reasoning for that was as logical as it was surprising. I also enjoyed the moments in later episodes that talked about how ancient civilizations like the Egyptians used composting not only to enrich their crops but also to reinforce some of their cultural beliefs as well.
This Is a Gardening Show was educational and amusing.
This is a Reader’s Digest book and has some wonderful pictures. My husband and I love a lot of color around our house, and this book has given us some great ideas. The sections are divided into color zones, which I really appreciate…especially when I’m looking for a certain color to add more curb appeal to our front yard.
Some wonderful themes for gardens, if you are looking for ideas. I enjoy just thumbing through this book to get ideas, even if some of them are a little more ambitious that we want to bite off.
This book has been an invaluable help. My husband named our house “Rose Cottage” and, at last count, we have 30+ rose plants. Pruning is always nerve-racking for me…some roses grow on new growth and some on old growth…what to do, what to do? This book tells you!
This book isn’t exactly about gardening, but we love birds and this book has some really neat things you can put in your yard and garden to help encourage birds to hang out with you.
My mama gave this book to me one year for Christmas. Some of the ideas are pretty ingenious, others… I’m not so sure about. But, I’m all for going all natural in my yard (you know, because of birds, bees, butterflies, hummingbirds–not to mention I have a cat who likes to go out).
Not only do I like doing all natural outside, I think we can use a lot of nature’s remedies as well for us instead of picking up a pill bottle. And I love container gardening, so this is a book I use a lot.
I like this one especially because it talks directly to my area. We have a water garden and I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from this book on how to make it prettier.
