Customer Reviews

The Four Leaf Clover Kit (Mega Mini Kits)

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Buy something else off this wonderful website, treat a loved one to a drink, call one of those hotlines and feed Sally Struthers and some poor child in Ethiopia for a month -- but, I implore you, do _anything_ with the $6.95 you've got burning a hole in your pocket except buy this kit.

First I must preface this review with saying that, while I am not the king of impulse buying, I do likely rank somewhere high up in its royalty. I am almost certain that I am single-handedly responsible for ensuring that my supermarket stays fully stocked with those horrible little manuals in the checkout line about palm-reading, shiatsu, feeding my diabetic loved ones and how to give the neighborhood cat Mrs. Teeples an emergency tracheotomy and rescue breathing if she suddenly chokes on her kibble. It runs in my family -- I have relatives with stockpiles of these things. I can't help it. It's congenital, like heart problems or certain social diseases.

In any case, the "Four-Leaf Clover Kit" (herein known as the "FLCK", partly out of shorthand convenience and partly because it's one letter away from what they did to me when they took my seven bucks at the register) was yet another one of these impulse buys, this time at a local chain bookstore. When I first bought the kit, I was absolutely delighted -- the prospect of being able to grow my own four leaf clovers! A box of my own luck! And, oh, what a cute little box it was. I spent the entire drive home cooking up a fantasy about how positively fashionable and chic I would be with a bundle of four-leaf clovers growing on my coffee table. I even decided to take the little plastic pink flamingoes from the very similar and quite adorable Pink Flamingo Gift Set and stick them in the dirt in an effort to create a veritable microcosm of kitsch. I congratulated myself on my overall tack brilliance and fortune for a good find. After all, if you're going to be tacky, you've got to be tacky right -- and the FLCK with some flamingo magic appeared to be ready to do that trick marvelously.

What the folks that make the FLCK don't appear particularly keen on you knowing (and, by you, I mean me) as their potential customer is that this kit DOES NOT CONTAIN ALL FOUR-LEAF CLOVERS. In fact, it's almost certain that this little box won't contain any four-leaf clovers at all. Squirreled away microscopically on the back of the box is a little asterisked whimper of don't-sue-us-please hinting at the truth: "Some seed packets may not yield a four-leaf clover." The part that they neglect to hint at (although perhaps I've missed it and they've managed to come up with even tinier print and engraved it on the surface of one of the clover seeds -- I doubt it but quite frankly I lack the proper magnifying equipment to say for sure) is that, according to a very nice lady with a botany Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, only roughly one out of every ten thousand white clovers -- the very kind these folks are wanting your seven dollars for -- will have four leaves and that there's no real way to guarantee clovers of the four-leaf variety because, honestly, nobody really knows why we have them in the first place. My personal version of the FLCK has roughly 300 seeds in it, and, assuming all of the seeds germinate which is completely improbable, the math becomes pretty straightforward at this point: I'd have been better off buying a lottery ticket and managed to waste seven dollars on a box full of something that's growing in almost every lawn in North America.

To be fair to the company that makes this (and perhaps fairer than they deserve), squirreled away in print Siberia on page 19 of the tiny book that comes in the package there is a note explaining that these seeds have not been genetically altered and that I'll "just have to wish hard and hope that good luck comes [my] way." That would have been fine had I known what I was buying, but the packaging appears built to deceive: there are more four-leaf clovers printed on the one box I own alone than I'd imagine the company has ever managed to produce in the first place.

So, please, I beg of you, until the fine folks marketing this thing get around to changing the name to something along the lines of the "Seven-Dollar Three-Leaf Clover Kit That Has a Negligible Chance of Growing One of Your Clovers with One Extra Leaf" (although I'll be the first to admit that SDTLCKTHaNCoGRoYCwOEL just doesn't have the same ring to it) please don't encourage them and take that seven dollars to someone else. After all, Sally Struthers could really use a meal these days. And after she's done, so could one of those kids in Ethiopia -- the ads don't say it, but I'm sure they'd agree: even starving children can't eat clovers for dinner.

I picked up the THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER KIT as a little fun gift for myself and an Aunt. When I read the enclosed pamphlet inside the box it basically said enclosed was a bag of clover seeds, none were genetically altered and if you're lucky you might find a four-leaf clover.
So the chances of a four-leaf clover in the THE FOUR-LEAF CLOVER KIT are the same as finding a four-leaf clover in the mass of weeds available in any front or back yard.
The name on the kit is just a flat out lie and I was very disappointed.

Recieved package quickly in post. Box is very cute but on reading the fine print on the box I was advised that this product may not contain actual four leaf clover which is disappointing as I purchased this product for my young nephew to grow a four leaf clover.

I had forgotten I ordered this until I was asked to review it. The tracking number says it was delivered, but I never got it. I don't know where it is. It was going to be a gift for a friend.