Zine Review: Gardening

Tony A Smith, [email protected],$4

This zine’s content is dry and written in an instructional tone; additionally, read­ing it is made difficult by the uneven text produced by the old typewriter used to type the majority of the zine.

The lines are crammed together on top of each other, and certain letters seemed permanently subscript or super­script, so it takes a lot of concentration to actually follow the text. Some sections seem to have been produced with a com­puter using a typewriter-like font, but even those passages are still formatted oddly and lack capital letters. There’s a lot of text which is only occasionally in­terspersed with clip art and illustrations lifted from children’s books, and this makes the pages dense and hard to fol­low.

I’d like to read more about Smith’s per­sonal experiences learning to garden, especially how his formal education in agriculture influenced the practical pro­cesses, and maybe some wisdom he picked up that wasn’t covered at school. I could learn how to compost or save seeds online or in a library book, but in a zine, I’d rather read things I can’t find in a WikiHow article. (Mary Green)