Welcome to Pages In Read Ink, Home of Jeane Candido,
publisher and author of My Bloomin' Insanity.

Ever since the one-strike-and-you-are-out edict of the Biblical Garden of Eden, we mortals have tried to plant a small Eden of our own. If not forgive and forget, perhaps at least the Creator will devote a few seconds of eternity and help us overcome the odds of actually growing a small garden in that clay and rock wasteland called a suburban housing tract. Gardening is a wonderful, painful, paranoidal, spiritual insanity and I was caught up in it.

I was bound to have a garden--gardening genes had been passed down to me through my Depression-era parents and grandparents who truck farmed and canned on a par with H.J. Heinz. How to convert a landfill of congealing construct debris into a garden without putting myself into an asylum or debtors' prison, was the challenge. The garden centers and mail order houses were driving up the stock exchange with temptation on a gigantic scale, and I was as eager as a woman in fat-free cheese cake factory with a half-off sale. But gardening was also a subculture not for the weak and faint-hearted. I had to cultivate the combined skills of a Goldman-Sachs trader and a ninja warrior. And let's not forget the muscle of a body-builder to haul all those bags of soil and dig out rocks that went to China. Gardening went quickly from an ildylic dream to an obsession. Somewhere in the process I found that it is not what gardens give us but what we give our gardens that elevates the soul. Success is not measured in size and harvest, but in lessons learned about myself.