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.