It's almost Christmas. Wow!

Luckily there's still time to get something nice for the gardener in your life.These four items are available at your local garden center or on Amazon.com1. "Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener "by famous plant breeder Joseph Tychonievich. This wonderful little book reads like a novel. Tychonievich is in love with plant breeding, and soon you are too. He reaches into the past before commercial breeders dominated garden centers and box stores."Do as your grandmothers did," he says."Get all the available diversity of the plant that interests you, say a viola. Plant the seeds and let the bees get to work cross pollinating. Save the seeds and check out their descendants. Save the best and do it again until you start seeing traits you are looking for."This lighthearted book will make you smile.2. Nitrile garden gloves are great. You can never have enough of them. I buy the four packs and keep a pair wherever I might need them. Atlas Nitrile 370 garden gloves are the ones I prefer. Since I always temporarily lose gloves here and there, I keep an extra set in my seed starting area for backup.3. Ergonomic pruning shears. I love my pruners. They have a ratchet action that saves my arthritic hands and they have plenty of torque.4. Finally, a free catalog from the "Seed Saver's Exchange" (Seedsavers.org). This organization is dedicated to saving heirloom seeds for vegetables, fruit, and flowers. It's the perfect partner for "Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener."As we eat the bounty from our fall harvest and celebrate the holidays with our friends and family, in the heart of each gardener we know that when winter comes, spring cannot be far behind.