Friday, July 26, 2013

Are You Addicted to Gardening?

Yeh, I recognize a few of these...most of these...all of these...Ok, all of them except maybe one or two...

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You Know You’re Addicted to Gardening When…

  • Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas, rubber clogs and a cup of coffee.
  • You grab other people’s banana peels, coffee grinds, apple cores, etc. for your compost pile. 
  • You have to wash your hair to get your fingernails clean.
  • When you randomly pull weeds wherever you go.
  • All your neighbors come and ask you questions.
  • When you creep around the garden on damp evenings with a torch and collect the snails and take them to safe place very far away from the garden.
  • You know the temperature of your compost every day.
  • You buy a bigger truck so that you can haul more mulch.
  • You enjoy crushing Japanese beetles because you like the sound that it makes.
  • Your boss makes “taking care of the office plants” an official part of your job description.
  • Everything you touch turns to “fertilizer”.
  • You weed in the rain.
  • You find yourself "deadheading" at Home Depot and Lowe's.
  • Your non-gardening spouse becomes conversant in botanical names.
  • You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go, even at funerals.
  • Every time you trim a bush, you HAVE to use the cuttings to start new plants.
  • You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial landscapers remove them to plant annuals. 

You Know You’re Addicted to Gardening When…

  • You put gardening pictures on your screen saver.
  • You plan vacation trips around the locations of botanical gardens, arboreta, historic gardens, etc.
  • You plant & transplant at night with flashlights & a porch light.
  • You sneak home a 7-foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your spouse will notice.
  • You notice good dirt when driving around town.
  • When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.
  • You always carry a shovel, bottled water and a plastic bag in your trunk as emergency tools.
  • You scan CraigsList under Farm/Garden to find new friends.
  • You count earthworms and red worms among your inner circle of friends.
  • You appreciate your Master Gardener badge more than your jewelry.
  • You talk “dirt” at baseball practice.
  • You know what guerilla gardening is and how to make seed bombs.
  • You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.
  • You bring home rocks from vacations to put them in your garden.
  • You like the smell of horse manure better than Estee Lauder.
  • You rejoice in rain…even after 10 straight days of it.
  • You have pride in how bad your hands look.
  • Your “easy” chair is a lawn chair perched in the shade with a good view of the garden.
  • You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter. 

You Know You’re Addicted to Gardening When…

  • You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.
  • Soil test results actually mean something.
  • You understand what IPM means and are happy about it.
  • You’d rather go to a nursery to shop than a clothes store.
  • You know that Sevin is not a number.
  • You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour”.
  • You look at your child’s sandbox and see a raised bed.
  • You ask for tools for Christmas, Mother/Father’s day, your Birthday and any other occasion you can think of.
  • You go to the back door of the natural foods store and haul away big boxes of veggie scraps to make compost piles.
  • You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away.
  • You scold total strangers who don’t take care of their potted plants.
  • You know how many bags of fertilizer/potting soil,/mulch your car will hold.
  • You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score extra bags of leaves for your compost pile.
  • Customers at the garden centers ask YOU for advice and not the nice ladies with clean hands and wearing aprons with the company name on them.
  • Your preferred reading matter is seed catalogs. 
And last but not least: 

You know that the four seasons are:

  • Planning the Garden
  • Preparing the Garden
  • Gardening~and~
  • Preparing and Planning for the next Garden.