Well it’s been about 1 month since an update. Things were a bit tough on me this time. ChatGPT really helped and so did the defold forums.
First I now have a randomized tile map for the garden. Each time it plays the rocks, trees, and obstacles are randomly generated and mirrored on the opposite garden. This was 100% done by ChatGPT. Also I added collisions to the garden obstacles and border so that the polyominos reset if not placed in a legal manner.
Next issue was rotating my polyominos and maintaining the animation upright after rotation. This is where the defold forum helped. I was creating a new animation for each 90 degree turn but that was a lot of animations. So I asked for a better way and @WhiteBoxDev came through with a great solution. make the animation tiles a child of the polyomino game object. Then after rotating 90 degrees do a counter rotation on each of the tiles.
Now I had to fix several things in my code. First thing was I had to learn how to use a collection factory. It wasn’t very difficult, but the big issue is now my object_id doesn’t work since the collection factory returns a table wiht object_ids for each game object in the collection. I finally figured that out and how to get to the obect I wanted. And lesson here was use a generic name for the polyominos and learn LUA tables 
This thread helped me with Collection factory ID issue.
https://forum.defold.com/t/get-address-of-component-from-collection-factory-instance-solved/66441
The actual game part is still a ways off and the graphics will be overhauled. But this is where I’m at for the moment.