Childrens Book Review of Strega Nona's Harvest by Tomie dePaola, Number Ten in the Series

Spring brings melting snows to peninsular Italy’s southwesternmost region of Calabria. Warmer days cause Strega Nona to reflect upon the year’s outdoor activities. Harvests contribute to Grandma Witch Nona’s:

• Feasts;
• Meals;
• Remedies.

Every year, she follows critical rules to ensure healthy outputs from the current garden and for all subsequent annual plantings. She gathers and stores seeds from each season’s harvest. She gets them from winter-stored packets in a wood box. After chanting to May’s full moon and releasing three airborne kisses, she has the seeds in the soil and ready for lush growth by:

• Adhering to proper planting depths and distances hoed respectively straight down and across;
• Amending the soil with animal manure and garden compost.

Big Anthony decides to put in a garden behind the goat shed. He dislikes the insistence by Bambolona, the baker Signor Bambo’s daughter and Strega Nona’s assistant, upon straight-lined rows. He does not copy Strega Nona’s perfect alignments. He gives six, not three, kisses to the full moon’s light. He has no clue as to problem-solving chaotic, rampant growth weeks later at harvest time. But he knows that Strega Nona -- whose garden yields attractive, fragrant, tasty produce from accessible rows -- will put his over-abundant harvests to good use. He leaves piles of edibles on her doorstep. Calabria’s most grandmotherly witch makes a feast for the entire village with the bounty from Big Anthony’s disorderly garden.

Accomplished chefs and gardeners contemplate inputs by:

• Brands;
• Trademarks.

Tomie dePaola indeed devotes time free from illustrating and writing books -- with pre-publication help from Apple iPods and Macintoshes -- to creating culinary and horticultural wonderworks. He finds as particularly conducive to quality outputs reliance upon:

• Biscuit flour from The White Lily Southern Kitchen;
• Meat from Lobel’s of New York and Niman Ranch;
• Plants from Spring Ledge and White Flower Farms;
• Sheep-milk cheese from Old Chatham Sheepherding Company;
• Supplies from Stonewall Kitchen and Williams-Sonoma.

All of the above-mentioned inputs undoubtedly merge to churn Strega Nona’s Harvest into one of G.P. Putnam’s Sons’s top-quality publications in 2009 for:

• Ages 4 – 8+;
• Grades preschool through third grade and onward.

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Spring melting of snow in Calabria alerts Strega Nona to annual cycle of planting, with emphasis on rotation gardening, and subsequent bountiful harvests.
Sila National Park: Catanzaro, Cosenza, and Crotone Provinces, Calabria, southern Italy: Ndn at English Wikipedia, CC BY SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ITALY_SILA2.jpg

In "Strega Nona's Harvest," Big Anthony watches Strega Nona blow three kisses to the moon, but he still manages to bumble the spell for plentiful harvest.
daytime moon over Calabria: Tina Cara Photography, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinacara/5230999249/

Tomie dePaola's Strega Nona series celebrates Calabria's rural landscape.
Livestock wend their way near Lake Ariamacina in Sila National Park, founded in 1997 and encompassing rural and tourist villages.
Lago di Ariamacina, Sila National Park, Catanzaro Province, Calabria, southern Italy: Emanuele Guerrieri, CC BY SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lago_Ariamacina.jpg

"Strega Nona’s Harvest~ a read aloud" (8:37)
Uploaded Oct. 20, 2021, by Creative Read Alouds to YouTube ~ URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buJKpXGMOXw

dePaola, Tomie. 2009. Strega Nona's Harvest. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

"Tomie's Links." Tomie.com. Retrieved January 5, 2015.

• Available at: http://www.tomie.com/being_an_artist/tomies_links.html