Dirty Hands, Wrong Season

A Filipino gardener in California. Unfamiliar soil. Twenty-six essays about what grows, what doesn't, and why he keeps planting anyway.

Dirty Hands, Wrong Season is a book about gardening the way most of us actually do it -- imperfectly, inconsistently, and without the tidiness of a seed-catalog photograph. Each essay is short, specific, and honest: an ampalaya that died before anyone thought to ask about it; a lavender that refuses to cooperate no matter how many ways the author tries; a mango seedling abandoned as soon as something else needed watering; a season of peas that went, for once, exactly right.

These are not lessons. They are accounts -- of pride, of compulsion, of the particular fatigue that sets in when a garden asks more than you want to give, and of the occasional, unexpected harvest that makes you pick up a trowel again.

For readers who garden with more hope than expertise. For anyone who has ever watched something they planted slowly die and wondered if it was their fault. For Filipinos who have tried to grow something from home in soil that doesn't know what it is.

Funny, quiet, and harder to put down than a book about gardening has any right to be.