If you're thinking of raising some gnomes of your own I'd say just don't? Yeah lots of people hear that they drink dew and they eat mostly strawberries that they cause to grow out of the ground with their gnome magic. And that's all true but it gives a really false impression of how difficult gnome husbandry actually is.
For one thing you need a lot of space. I have a wizard tower, it's bigger on the inside, so that solves it there; honestly if you don't have a similar setup I would not recommend it because they need a shocking amount of space for how small they are.
But the real difficulty is just maintaining enough ambient whimsy to sustain the colony. Gnomes that can't get enough whimsy will develop a whimsy deficiency and die really rather quickly. If you're not careful that kind of thing can and will take out a whole colony, because as you can imagine if a gnome is lying dead on the grass all the whimsy in the vicinity is pretty much kaput.
Listen, I have an illusionist coming in twice a week to do rainbows, I have a druid who's in here daily in bird form doing funny little songs, I have a supplier who brings in a cartload of dandelions every week. Don't even think about getting into gnomes if you don't have a dandelion guy. All this costs money; really the bulk of my gnome costs are coming from whimsy maintenance and it's not cheap.
If I'm being totally honest, I'm thinking of getting out of the gnome game. Yeah. In this economic environment it's just harder and harder to sell a pound of gnome steaks at a price that actually reflects the costs of keeping a gnome colony going. And it really doesn't help our cause that everyone seems to think any yahoo with a grassy meadow can get a breeding pair of gnomes and suddenly be in the money, you know?
