Herban Bliss: Are You Addicted to Gardening?

Friday, July 26, 2013

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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 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 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:

Herban Bliss