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.
All your neighbors come and ask you questions.
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”.
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
You dumpster-dive for discarded bulbs after commercial
landscapers remove them to plant annuals. You plan vacation trips around the locations of botanical
gardens, arboreta, historic gardens, etc.
You sneak home a 7 foot Japanese Maple and wonder if your
spouse will notice.
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 appreciate your Master Gardener badge more than your jewelry
You talk “dirt” at baseball practice.
You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the
compost pile than for cooking.
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.
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 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
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
-Author Unknown