You Know You’re Obsessed with Gardening When…

• You know the difference between mulch, compost, composted manure, fertilizer, peat, and dirt.
• Your neighbors recognize you in your pajamas and clogs from doing early morning watering.
• You take every single person who enters your house on a “garden tour”.
• You had to buy a special brush to clean under your fingernails at the beginning of the work week.
• People describe you as granola, earthy, and bohemian.
• You’ll spend a whole day canning in a 100 degree kitchen.
• People call you to see if they can come over to get some green onions instead of going to the store.
• You can fill an 18 gallon bin with mulch in under a minute.
• You bribe people to help you with tasks by promising them vegetables.
• Neighbors stop by to ask you questions, even when you’ve never met them before.
• You plan on buying a fuel-efficient SUV for your next vehicle so you can haul more mulch.
• You’ll drive 4 hours just to pick up composted manure.
• Your sisters come to you for plants instead of going to the store.
• You find yourself feeling leaves, flowers and trunks of trees wherever you go.
• When considering your budget, plants are more important than groceries.
• You always carry a pitchfork or shovel, gardening gloves, and bags in the trunk as emergency tools.
• You have a typed map of your gardens, including a desire list.
• You know what it feels like when your fingernails hurt from digging too much with your hands.
• You don’t understand why people have to lay around to get a tan.
• You’ll get up early to water the garden, but not to meet your friends for breakfast.
• You spend more time chopping your kitchen greens for the compost pile than for cooking.
• You know when official planting day is for your area & you know how to decide when it can be earlier.
• You can identify plants by their leaves or sprouts and quiz yourself on each plant when going for walks.
• You own a pitchfork, even though you live in the city.
• You rejoice in rain… even after 10 straight days of it.
• You take pride in how bad your hands look.
• You do laundry only when you need fresh gardening clothes.
• You have your relatives bring plants when they come to visit.
• You have a decorative compost container on your kitchen counter.
• You can give away plants easily, but compost is another thing.
• You drive around on recycling day to gather discarded newspapers for placing under mulch.
• When you go to the farmer’s market, you stay an extra hour to answer strangers’ questions by the seedlings.
• You’d rather go to a plant nursery than a clothes store.
• Your neighbor kids know how to put their food remnants in your compost bin.
• You ask for gardening tools for Christmas, your birthday and any other occasion you can think of.
• You can’t bear to thin seedlings and throw them away. You say they just want to live!
• You’re trying to revive the canning movement.
• You know how many gallons of mulch your car will hold.
• You can get to the compost site from memory, but still get lost on your way to your sister’s house.
• Your take pictures of your garden every week so in the winter you can plan which plants to add at what times.
• You know what zone you live in.
• You exclaim out loud when you find a new plant left on your deck for you by a neighbor.
• Your non-gardening sisters start rolling their eyes as soon as you start talking about your day.
• You start a blog because facebook’s status updates don’t allow enough words to explain your excitement!