The funniest gardening book ever . . . seriously.

Early Reviews of Attack of the Killer Asparagus

Amazon.com review by Thomas Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping

Okay, this actually IS the funniest book I ever read about gardening. Mike Nowak is a hoot, and his writing is simply delightful. It always surprises you. You never know exactly what direction he's going with something here, and the surprises are too fun....and always way funny.

This would be an excellent choice for a present for anyone you know who likes to garden and enjoys a good laugh. Mike Nowak is actually a very accomplished gardener and has been the host of a number of popular horticulture-themed radio shows for many years in the Midwest. However, unlike so many garden writers who perhaps are prone to taking themselves a bit too seriously, Mike never does. He knows how easy it is to make dumb mistakes in the garden and he's not afraid to admit to having made a ton of them himself. I hope this book finds a big, wide audience, as it is something different & it is both smart, clever and fun!

Weedpatch Gazette review by Rommy Lopat

The Polish Garden Writers Club (2 members so far)
"I have a friend named Mike Nowak, a fellow hale & hearty Pole and (hail and hardy) garden writer (although Mike is way way way more prodigious than I). He just sent me his new book, in which he wrote the following inscription (which I suspect he writes in every book he autographs, even when the book was not written by him): “To _____: who is almost as funny as I am”. This made me laugh. A rare thing, these days, what with beheadings, floods, social injustice, and difficulty finding the Alpo dog food my dogs prefer.

Um, back to Mike's book. One thing I realized about myself after I read most of his essays is that I mostly read backwards. That is, I don't start at the beginning and go forward. Instead, I randomly thumb through a book, breaking the spine at not-the-middle, let my eye alight on a line of text, and then I read from that point forward. If I like it (which in this case I did, a lot), I will page back to the first paragraph of the essay and then read all the way through. This bad habit probably started in college when I learned to read only the first chapter, last chapter, and last paragraph of every chapter in a book. This trick sped up the Russian Revolution considerably….

Mike also helped me discover another bad habit: I am a page corner “folder-over”. (Hmm, maybe it's “fold-over-er”?) That's how, like a dog, I mark territory I like. And I folded over an awful lot of pages in this book. Not because I was learning anything about gardening (no one, not even Mike Nowak, actually KNOWS anything about gardening), but because so many pages are very funny. Out loud funny. Being Polish, of course, I especially enjoyed his description of his long-departed relative, Telewizja Kablowa “Cable TV” Nowakowa, who, operating out of a small village near Krakow, is said to have created cooking recipes for over 12,000 insect species…” This made me guffaw, which in Polish, is spelled, guffav. Or guffow. Never mind. More