Saturday, April 07, 2007

Simply Perfect Container Gardening and Rosie - review


Colourful magazines are the bonbons of litterature; they have glossy covers and you consume them fast. The good things are that they don't disappear after the first use, and that they don't add to your weight (especially true if you walk around while you are reading them :-) ). When I found Rosie on Nordic Gardens I decide to review the magazine together with an english language equivalent.

Simply Perfect Container Gardening
Better Homes and Gardens Special Interest Publications
This is a magazine from the US and one of the helpful ones. For exemple you find a zone map at page 5, which is interesting to international readers too - gardening, as everything else, sprouts international contacts, and the map is useful in when comparing gardening experiences and climates. (Of course I have use for it when I mirror this blog from Parkettodlaren.) I was a bit unhappy with the pictures; I'm a person who flaps through the pages and look at the pictures for inspiration. The quality of the pictures is a tad bad, which gives a hint of garishness, making them hard to look at when you have a headache - or hangover*.

The articles were interesting and I had to tear myself away from more than one of them. Unfortunately no mentioning of vegetables, and I'm not surprised by that. People growing vegetables indoors seldom seems to be interested in aestetics, and this magazines covers aestetics a lot, you get a lot of tips about colour scheming and how to best display eye candy. The only thing about this magazine is that it's a special interest publication from Better Homes and Gardens and will probably only be released once a year. Rats!

Rosie

Rosie is purely swedish, so I can't recommend an international mother magazine to you. It's a publication I immediately found pleasant. It covers gardening in small spaces and on balconies to a larger extent than any other swedish gardening magazine. On the other hand I don't find much about indoor vegetables, but this is a hobby with few followers here...

Hm, I think I'll email them inviting them to write a reportage of my home, heh.

Well, like Perfect Container this is a helpful magazine. The aricles are a bit shallower, but you get good instructions on how to build your own plant box, and on how to grow potatoes, both outdoors and in buckets. The pictures and layouts are good, which is important for me as a 'flapper'.

Now, I'll enter their contest with "Känsla för jord" ("Feeling for soil" - only available in swedish) as a prize, since that book is on my wishlist. And I will win, won't I?

*Don't you ever believe that teetotallers don't get hangovers. They only come with another name - and you haven't even had fun first.

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