You know you're a gardener if ...

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Published on 02/21/03

You know you're a gardener if ...

By Wayne McLaurin

University of Georgia

 

Volume XXVIII
Number 1
Page 7

You know you're a gardener if ...

  • You have an extra refrigerator for storing seed.
  • You feed more than seven families with one zucchini plant.
  • Your seed-packet collection dates back to 1976 or earlier.
  • You get up in the middle of the night to see if your seeds have germinated.
  • Every scratch pad in your house is filled with landscape ideas.
  • You've moved a plant more than 11 times.
  • Neighbors close their door when they see you coming with a paper sack full of vegetables.
  • You get more than 35 seed catalogs per year.
  • You're building an extra outbuilding to house your gardening tools.
  • You have more than one notebook filled with garden plans.
  • Your children refuse to stop at just one more garden on the "vacation garden tour."
  • You've gotten a load of manure for a Christmas present.
  • You've broken a truck axle hauling sand or stones for a walkway.
  • Your garden pond is more advanced than your indoor plumbing.
  • You've been brave enough to plant bamboo.
  • You've given your wife a rototiller for your anniversary.
  • You've financed a plant for more than six months.
  • You have more than three compost piles in your backyard.
  • You've been banned from more than two botanical trial gardens.
  • You have a secret credit card account for fertilizer and plant charges.
  • You're taking Spanish classes to better understand your gardener.
  • You've chained yourself to a three-year-old tomato plant you're trying to save.
  • You think that bamboo has potential as a container plant.
  • You've used a sweet potato as a centerpiece at a dinner party.
  • Collards are a necessary part of your landscape, or collards growing inside of a cut-and-painted tire are.
  • You've put one of those stupid artificial rocks with the writing on it in your garden.
  • Your encourage your spouse to go fishing to have the fish heads for fertilizer under your plants.
  • You use your chipped pots for toad houses.
  • You let the garden snakes stay because they eat bugs even though they scare the daylights out of you every time.
  • The eating of the first tomato is ritualized with a candlelight dinner and is the only time you use an ironed, cloth tablecloth all year.
  • They've reserved your parking space at the garden center.
  • Your raised beds are better constructed than your back steps.
  • You've replaced the soil in your beds with the soil cleaned from the back-entrance hallway.

Wayne McLaurin is a professor emeritus of horticulture with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Experts/Sources:
Wayne J. McLaurin
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