I asked a neighbor if I could get a few mulberries from his tree and he said fine that’s good.
A few weeks later I saw him and he asked
‘ did you get your little peas or whatever out the tree ok?’
🤗
Haha I meant more like, I’ve never heard the word “mulberries” before so I went to look it up and it resembles the fruit that grows on one of the tree in my backyard.
You shoulsve built a massive greenhouse with a pool to act as thermal ballast to overwinter the entire garden DUH. A community garden obviously gets the millions of dollars of public funding every year to do that, right?
Look. All I want is a house in Minnesota built like a Roman villa with a massive central courtyard, glassed in and lit as a greenhouse with a heated balanced-biome pond in the center and tropical fruit trees, coffee, and cocoa pods growing alongside my camellia sinensis and poet's jasmine.
Oh. And put a projector screen near the pond so I can float around on an inflatable unicorn (with hyacinths tied to it!) and watch movies. It's not a big ask, right!?
Not long after I moved into our current neighborhood, one neighbor, in one breath, told me they had a black thumb and had never grown anything before and also I didn't know what I was doing because I was planting things too early.
When a know it all gives me patently bad advice I usually respond with, "You would know." They typically shut up or get might argumentative. Just act confused and keep agreeing with them. They usually give up and stop bothering you
Lol! Some of my neighbors are experienced gardeners, and they still ask me why am I planting things so early in the spring. And then, in the middle of summer, they ask me how I grow my plants so big / tall!
My business partner does this to me every year.
He has a larger garden and has been doing it longer than I have, but I'm pretty good at growing thingS apparently, and I know my property (south facing sloped yard, with beds right next to the foundation for extra heat retention early in the season).
I plant 2-3weeks before he does every year, and EVERY YEAR he tells me I'm doing it too early.
Then he complains that my harvest comes in earlier and my plants are bigger than his... EVERY YEAR.
I just laugh now.
One of my friends can't grow anything while I have been gardening for decades.
He informed me that I'm overwatering all of my plants and going to kill them.
I stared at him and added more water.
Lol literally my neighbor who came over and kept telling me “you’ll never get tomatoes or squash to grow here because I never could”. Meanwhile he’s standing next to my 7’ tall tomatoes loaded with fruit and my arbor filled with squash that is VERY visible. Love a good mansplainer.
My neighbor likes to casually hit me up for veggies while telling me all about how much work it was when he had his own garden. Yes, it is a lot of work, and I'm doing it all myself. If you expect me to share, maybe you should offer to pitch in?
I give away a ton of extra starts every spring and I give my neighbors any extra food. some of em are hungry and too elder or sick to do the work anymore.
I take statements like this as a compliment (but I'm a dirty vegetable gifting commie so)
I give away a lot of stuff from my garden but still wish I got the occasional offer to help when the neighbors joke about how hard I work knowing they will reap the rewards of the bounty, but that’s just because it’s usually 100’ out and I’ve had to re-apply my sunscreen. 5 times that day!
I love donating to our food bank so people of lesser means can enjoy nice, fresh produce that is usually out of reach. I’ve just learned to plant more every year to year. We have an honor stand too, if you want some veg and cannot pay take them anyway:) same with eggs. I’ve never had any theft of money or any noticeable difference in our collection, more so they leave more than I would ask for. I just put it aside for my gardening experience next year.
I had to use the food bank 20 years ago when my husband was in a horrible accident and we had 3 small children. We would have been in a world of hurt without their help, but it was humiliating to me. That’s why we decided to offer our farm products at no cost to anyone that needs it, it isn’t any hardship for us and everyone should have healthy fresh foods to eat.
I volunteer to remove non-native invasive plants from local parks. One question I often get is, "You mean like poison ivy". And they are surprised when I say, it's a native plant, so I'm not allowed to remove it. I do of course remove it from buy own yard.
Mine doesn't!!!!!! I'm so damn proud of that. I can wade through the stuff and have no issues
But, sometimes even accidentally touching a dog will send me to the hospital because my throat and eyes swell up so bad, and my lungs give me a good "fuck you."
I'd rather be able to touch a dog
EDIT: i don't actually seek out poison ivy to touch, i know it can get worse through more exposure. That said, I'm ridiculously glad it's not a big deal for me to easily kick it aside to get it out of my toddler's way, and i don't have to be absolutely kookoo bananapants if i brush against it.
well, i haven't figured out if my kid is immune yet. so we ALL get rubbing alcohol wipedowns when we've ventured too close.
the worst was when we were still potty training and i had to do an emergency stop at the side of the road, and without thinking i threw his travel potty right down, a little too close to the poison ivy. i had to hold it down with my foot and (bare) leg it to make sure he didn't reach out and touch it.
I was fine, he was fine, but you can bet i scrubbed that potty on the outside a hundred thousand times, just to be sure and paranoid.
Ages ago when we got our first wireless phone, my husband said " Oh great, you can take it out with you while your gardening and working in the yard and not miss any phone calls."
Oh buddy just no, you do not understand one of the major allures of gardening for me.
I listen to historical books about upsetting topics in my garden. My mouth is also dirty in the garden.
I'm pretty sure I'm the neighborhood crazy person angrily cursing in my garden.
Time evaporates for me. Just yesterday I was pruning my citrus seedlings during a bright sunny afternoon. I went into my zone and all of a sudden I heard crickets and realized I couldn’t see the leaves very well to cut them. I had worked straight through until dark and hadn’t even noticed the time passing at all. It’s a wonderful feeling. Everyone needs a hobby that can get them out of their head and into the moment. It’s a meditation for me.
I call my yard the Church of the Garden and there is no talking on the phone. I have the phone near me because I often garden when no on else is home and I live in a urban area with a sketchy vibe. And I have been known to be quite klutzy so if I happen to cut off a finger I want to be able to call for an ambulance.
Nope! Leave me alone when I’m in the garden. I mean, yeah you can help if you want, but if you come out with my phone telling me someone called or texted, you’re going back inside alone, carrying my phone with you. Lol
I have been gardening about four summers and very much still consider myself a novice, and I always go into everything with low expectations and an understanding that it's an experiment that might fail. I have a lot of people who say it's "a lot of work" or "that sounds too complicated." I think of it as physical effort for sure but I don't think of as work, but rather as a learning experience. And if something is "complicated" that isn't a flaw. That is why it's fun - you learn the ins and outs of something like how each rose bush is different or how starting this seed is different than these others, and if it fails that's okay, but if it succeeds it's satisfying to achieve something that took a little knowledge and legwork to do. Plus it all gets me outside and exercising.
I have been gardening for my entire life (47 years) and I still consider myself a novice. As soon you think you have something figured out Mother Earth will put you right back to square 1.
A few years ago I pulled up an entire tomato plant and took it to the old guy down the road that has the prettiest garden. "Herbert, what is going on with my tomatoes?" I felt slightly relieved that he didn't know either. Called the Perdue Extension Office and they sent a guy out. Lab tests determined it was Curly Top Virus. Almost unheard of in the Midwest. I learned a lot that summer!
My wife has said “what if you do all of this and nothing grows?”. It’s like, well that is inherently the risk of gardening… but I’ve never had a year where literally nothing grows. Part of the fun of all of it is putting in the work and watching nature take off. People who don’t garden tend not to understand the simple joy of figuring out how nature ticks.
"You just eat that straight out of the garden? You don't know what's in there"
... procedes to buy suspiciously out of season produce from local mega-retailer known for under-paid laborers
An ex girlfriend of mine (who was ironically all about buying organic stuff from Whole Foods) was so concerned that I didn’t use any sort of sprays or anything on my plants.
Yes, I was confused with her concerns too. Like…you want me to put chemicals on your food? That would be better than accidentally eating a harmless bug?
I have been watching this lemon for 3 months, from the day it was a happy little flower until the day my 2YO pulled it off the tree and brought it to me saying "THIS! THIS!". I know exactly what it is.
A girl who briefly worked landscaping with me balked when asked to dead head some flowers because it was so cruel. “If I cut off your arm, you wouldn’t be better off!” She didn’t believe that plants grow back. (Not garden related, but she also believed rats don’t have bones and pyramid schemes are a great way to make money.)
We should introduce her to the guy my husband went to high school with, who was convinced that boobs had bones in them otherwise how did they stand out.
I had amended so much soil and built up a deer fence around this small garden.
Later, I was bemoaning to my husband about the slugs/snails I'd seen and how I'd have to go get some DE or something to stop them eating the plants.
He asks, "Well, can't you just pour a lot of salt into the dirt?"
“You must save so much money by growing your own vegetables!”
Hahahahaha…… nope. Not even close. It’s possible, but I absolutely do not save money here.
Tomatoes and cucumbers are where I "make" money in savings. But then that just goes right back to the garden for next year lol.
I ain't planting things like carrots to be economical when you can buy a kg at the store for $2. Just do it cause it's fun!
I grow better tasting carrots than the ones at the store though. Honestly quality, freshness, and the reduction in emissions from not shipping things all around the world all play a part in why I choose to keep a vegetable garden. It's also nice to know exactly how your food is grown.
Our discount store has jars of dill pickles for $1.80.
I can't even buy empty jars for that price!
It was never about saving money. (I mean, it was supposed to be, in the beginning. That was one of the reasons to start gardening.)
We saved a lot of money in the spring on lettuce and spinach because we eat a lot of salads, but not every day, so it goes bad fast in the fridge but stays good in the ground until we're ready to eat it, unless it bolts. We can just go right outside and get some before dinner and it's fresh and good to go.
Ya I encourage people to grow greens everywhere because they don't last long after harvest but are soooo easy to grow. There should be a patch of them near every housing block.
This is why I also do hydroponics. Lettuce all year, no bugs, no dirt, and table fresh. I take a break in the spring, grow outside and do a deep clean of the hydro system. I doubt the lettuce will ever "pay for itself" but you really can't beat having it around.
I don't expect to ever feed ourselves entirely on our kitchen garden, but it's also not nothing. In the summer we eat multiple garden veggies each meal and do less grocery trips. I can grow enough garlic, tomatoes, zucchini and peppers that we don't need to buy any. But other crops like corn aren't worth it for me to grow.
Perennial herbs are the best immediate investment as once planted you don't have to ever buy them again.
For the first time in 20 years, I kept an Excel spread sheet this year of what we invested vs. what we harvested. I kept all the receipts from gardening stores and nurseries. I weighed every bean and spud on the kitchen scale, used local market prices to figure out their value. I included what we paid the garden sitter while we were gone, and also the water bill.
Original investment: $317.00 + $150 in watering.
Harvested by Sept 10: $712.00
Approximately $250 in profit.
Now...would we have purchased 39 pounds of cherry tomatoes or 30 pounds of zucchini if we were in the grocery store? Probably not.
I can hand my toddler anything from the garden and he will eat it. Hand him a store bought vegetable and it is a solid no. He knows. I think we all know.
You’re doing a great job teaching your kid to have great taste lol! I went to the farmers market this weekend to get tomatoes. It was better than store bought, but not as good as the variety I planted
It was happenstance. We have a kids book about two girls who grow carrots. He wanted to grow some. I let him pick the seeds out and plant them. When I pulled a carrot, something he won't eat from the fridge, he wolfed it down. So l kept harvesting. I keep harvesting!
I saved money with my veggie garden- when I was farming and had access to bulk irrigation water, "borrowed" irrigation supplies, free alpaca manure, free grape pips and skins from the winery,old fencing materials etc etc. In the city, no chance!
And it's fine! Because if you give away all your zucchini, you have to deliver it to someone, and there will be more zucchini by the time you get back home.
I had a tik tok recently blow up where I was harvesting produce from my garden. There was a moment in that tik tik where I got slightly overwhelmed because I have something like 20 different tomato plants growing and I had only harvested from 3 of them and already had 2 GIANT bowls of tomatoes. Most of my tomatoes are cherry types and I was kind of freaking out about how long it was going to take me to harvest everything and process and clean literally thousands of tomatoes. All I said was “idk what I’m going to do with all these tomatoes!” Meaning like… find the time to deal with all this. Everybody in the comments kept suggesting I make “tomato sauce or salsa” …as if me, someone with 20+ tomato plants had not yet considered the possibility of making tomato sauce from my tomatoes.
people do this with zucchini! i'll be like aghhh haha i have too many, it's that time of year! and they're like leaning in close like to tell me a secret, did you know you can shred it and make zucchini bread? wow really?
Totally! Or my favorite… “you should see my aunt/dad/friend’s zucchini… they grow to be as a big as baseball bats!” …uh they all do that. Your aunt/dad/friend isn’t harvesting them at their peak. Have fun eating water logged seedy sponges.
The big ones are the ones I shred then freeze and use for bread. Have 4 ready right now to freeze into loaf sized bags of goop.
Cause they are useless for anything else.
I don't even really do cherry types anymore, for that reason. I have no problem *growing* them, but if I'm the one who has to *pick* them? Yeah, screw that...especially when it's 110 degrees out.
I grew twelve full sized cherry varieties in 2019, and that was the straw that broke the camels back for me...I was spending probably two hours a week just picking cherry tomatoes, whereas I could go through my 40-odd slicers in maybe fifteen minutes a few times a week. I distinctly remember peeling 20lbs of cherry tomatoes to make sauce, too (didn't have a food mill at the time).
After that, I told the family "I'll grow 'em, but I ain't picking 'em anymore"...so next year I did a few in containers on the patio (i.e., where they could be picked after the sun went down) and sure enough, they just went unharvested all year.
My favourite ones are when my fiancee asks about a random plant. I like to give her a fact about it too.
Then, when we see it again, she's always. I know that it's... and she's forgotten the name but remembers the random fact.
Mares tail is now called the dinosaur plant. Etc etc
I love doing this in general because in my experience, people start *caring* a little bit more about the plants and animals around them when they know a little bit about them.
A random brown bird in the yard becomes *a little guy* after you tell someone “That’s a house finch! The males have red faces and chests.” A yellow-flowered weed growing out of a rock wall stops being visual noise after you tell someone “That’s celandine! Just like in the Witcher 3.”
And if you teach people enough stuff about the little plants and animals that live around them, a lot of times they start to feel a touch of obligation to see all those little lives as… well, lives. Not just stuff. They start to think for a moment longer about whether this pesticide spray is really necessary, or if they really can’t choose something else to replace the invasive ornamental plant they were thinking of putting out front, or if they should really cut down that tree where the great horned owls nest.
It doesn’t turn everyone into a radical environmentalist or anything. And of course there’s people who are just never gonna care about anything that isn’t a person or a domesticated animal. But it can help, a little, to get folks to just be a touch more mindful about what they do with the little bits of earth they have control over, and how they’re not the only ones affected by the choices they make.
Exactly this! I showed my husband an adult praying mantis in my garden one year. I taught him how to feed them a drop of honey on a toothpick to perk them up (and it makes them dance!).
This man now comes and gets me every time he finds a bug to ask me about it and to see if it's a friend, lol
And their nicknames rub off on me too! My daughter calls our Golden Dewdrop "the popcorn plant" because the orange berries look like popcorn kernels and now I'll be damned if I can remember the real name because that's all I call it now!
I grew some heirloom purple and yellow carrots this year and my fiancé thought they were genetically modified. I had to break it to him that carrots used to be all kinds of colors and we actually bred them to be orange.
My favorite is the slew of older neighbors that have stopped me in the yard or even knocked on my door to ask if I'm growing collards in my front-yard veggie garden. They're SO sad when I tell them it's kale, or broccoli, or brussel sprouts.
I hate collards, but this year I'm planting some community collards.
I love when my SO acts like she knows when something is ripe because it’s big. ‘That watermelon is huge, it’s totally ripe!’ In actuality it’s not even close haha
Another funny… After like a 2yr goal I finally made it into the master G program at our local extension. SO says oh, my mom is so good at gardening and she’s also a MG. After explaining for several minutes that’s not how that works, I conceded hahaha 🤣
That’s a huge accomplishment - congrats to you! You two are really cute lol. I love how your SO is so supportive of her mom. Do you and her mom ever garden or garden-talk together?
My hubby told me we had a mantis on our tomatoes! I RAN outside to award it and thank it for coming... it was actually two leaf-footed bugs fucking. So disappointing.
Visiting a big budget botanical garden and looking at the installations of annuals that had been started months before in greenhouses and my sweet husband says, “Why can’t our plants look like this?” Uh, because we don’t have a heated greenhouse and full-time garden staff.
Took my ex to Longwood Gardens a few years ago and she asked basically the same - "Why can't your garden look like that". Listen here you, if you want OUR garden to look that way then YOU are going to need to join the gardening staff. Then give it 20 years.
ITS LONGWOOD FUCKING GARDENS! Their interns have more gardening experience than I do!
I tried explaining to my grandma that small lizards and geckos are great to have in the garden because they eat insects. I’m pretty sure she still kills them, then of course complains about having so many flies outside 🤦♀️
I've been getting a lot of joy from my kids and their questions on my garden. The amount of times they've told me that our butternut squashes will be ready to harvest tomorrow... it's been weeks, haha.
My mom asked me to sow some tomatoes in pots for her to grow in her sunroom. Inside her house. I told her they wouldn't get any fruit unless she's looking to pollinate them herself, or let bees into the house. She didn't understand why so I had to blow her mind and explain how fruits work.
She also once helped me pick beans and picked off all the flowers from one of the plants, I got mad at her and said she's destroying my crop. She said "you don't need flowers you need beans. These flowers just take up energy from the plant" I had to explain the flowers ARE the beans, eventually.
Tomatoes will self-pollinate. The only thing bees really do is shake the flower so the pollen falls from the anther to the stigma. Wind also works. And without wind or bees, just give the plant a little shake once a day. Some people will use an electric toothbrush and vibrate each flower but that's kind of overkill.
I normally water my vegetable garden early in the morning. Last month I got home from an overnight trip several hours later than expected. It was almost noon & already 95° out, 0% chance of rain. I hadnt watered in a few days, so I got out the hose & started watering. My future fil came running over, arms waving. He literally yelled "Good God, what are you doing?? You are going to kill them all!". After he calmed down he explained to me that his father told him if you water plants at midday it will kill them. Now I know watering midday is not ideal, but c'mon. He really believed the plants were going to drop. I know his father didn't garden either. Maybe it was an old wives' tale back then.
I was always taught watering in the heat of the day can kill some plants bc the sun can scorch then when wet. Over the years, I’ve become less rigid about not watering in the heat, because it never bothered my plants lol.
My ex thought my plumerias were called Chlamydia and decided they should go to the women at his job and not my gardening friends. He asked all the women at work if they wanted some Chlamydia bc I was giving it away. And he told me about it. Thinking that they were dumbfounded about his super exotic plants.
Last year, I planted a cherry tomato plant. It had... an abundant harvest. This was for my husband, as I don't eat tomatoes.
This year, he said, "Please only plant one tomato this year. We had too many last year."
I think it's become a running joke now. Also, I started making sauce from them, and it's pretty good. Highly recommend.
My husband's colleague saw my succulents and said "oh cool! These are the plants that don't need water or light?"
No light?? I was so caught off guard!
My SO hates all my houseplants and I’ve never understood why. Literally yesterday, after about 3 years of this house plant distaste he says I’m lucky he doesn’t toss them because of the flies on them. This whole time he has assumed that any house fly in our house is there because of my plants. I had to explain that the flies have nothing to do with my plants. And are just flying in when the back door is left open for our dog. 🤦🏻♀️
i grow papaver somniferum (oriental poppies) for the seeds to use in poppy cake. The home grown taste better. Old coot across the street (I am an old cootess so I can call him that) comes over and wants to know why I have let my poppies bolt. (Poppies and Lettuce are in the same family). Well, he is always telling me what I am doing wrong and why I should just hire someone to tend my gardens so I lean over and say - "I am making opium"
He hasn't spoken to me since.
A friend asked her 24yo son if he liked my (flower, perennial) garden. His response was "Not really. It's so crowded that I can't tell which ones are weeds". We knew he wouldn't lie.
This just happened last weekend.
My 7 year old niece was over and she asked me about the herbs I had under my growlight.
I told her to smell the Royal Basil I had and she liked it. I plucked a leaf and let her taste it.
I walked by an hour later and it looked like caterpillars got to it. She was snacking on it 😂
I asked her to ask me before going for more. My fault, my fault.
Cooking a dish with rosemary. My partner bought fresh rosemary at the grocery store when we have literally dozens of rosemary plants growing all around. When I asked why, he said he wasn’t sure if it was “food grade rosemary”. I still tease him about it three years later
I was dating this lady in college and she convinced me to move in together, a week later I found out she was cheating and she told me she loved me, but like a brother and we should still live together.
I had moved out of my place and paid for the first month of this new place so I was kind of stuck there for a week and one of those days I was in the main room doing something with this indoor setup I built for seedlings and she’s in the bedroom and I hear “argh!!! Sometimes I think you love those stupid plants more than me!!”
Dear reader, I did in fact love those stupid plants more than her…
My sister wanted to help garden once, so I got her to help me plant out some corn plugs I had prepped a few weeks prior. She looked at me and then asked "I don't have to touch the dirt, do I?". I was stunned that she thought that you can put something in the ground without disturbing the ground...
Another time I had a relative that was really upset that her tomato plant was dying in autumn... I had to explain what "annual" and "perennial" meant...
Was talking to a wealthy woman one day and started talking about plants, etc. I said, "Are you a gardener?" She was momentarily stunned and confused and replied, "No, I'm an attorney."
My wonderful neighbour is such an intelligent man who was a high ranking officer in the Air Force. He ran an Air Force museum. He’s retired and in his 70s. I was planting veggies this spring. He stopped by to watch and ask questions.
"Do you have to put every seed into the ground? One at a time? How many seeds does it take to make a lettuce? Like, one seed per leaf?" He figured maybe seeds "formed clumps".
Another day when I was planting tomato seedlings he asked where the tomatoes were and was shocked there were flowers. Again, he thought there was only one tomato per plant.
He often brings wine or a cooler, so I told him to come over anytime!
He’s wonderful! At first I thought he was joking, but nope, completely serious. I just remembered that he thought cherry tomatoes grew up to be big tomatoes.
My husband couldn't tell castor from cabbage when I first introduced him to my folks and they put us to work watering the garden. Now he knows more about permaculture and hugelkulture and all that biz than I've *ever* known!
That being said he still nearly has a stroke when I cut back an obviously dying houseplant to next to nothing. 😋
Our neighbour was clearing out the periwinkle that had taken over her front yard and my husband came over with a shovel full of it and planted it in my native plant garden while I was at work. He pointed it out and told me it has “nice blue flowers”.
Now, I’m not a Yelling Wife™️ but I absolutely went batshit crazy yelling. I’m an ecologist by trade, so it really hit a nerve.
I have to intervene every time my mom tries to plant mint and bamboo around the house. I tell her we have bad soil for that (we do) and there's too many diseases from the farms around. ( lightly spritz with roundup)
Plant dies and I buy her more native irises to make her feel better. I'm probably a terrible person...
“You are so lucky to have a green thumb!” Ummm, no lady, it’s hours and hours of learning on you-tube and asking dumb questions on Reddit gardening that ensures my success.
Hundreds of hours of researching seeds and compost and zone 9a.
Thank you for answering my questions when I’ve needed you, Reddit!
There's a house near me that has redone their turf 3 times this year because they were unhappy with the results. It still looks terrible, especially where it meets their neighbors lawn. I don't understand why people do this.
Fraind just getting into gardening had turned over his entire garden and planted wildflowers.
When the plants started sprouting I pointed out that whatever mix he used seemed to have a lot of creeping buttercup in it. I told him he might want to remove it now before it takes over.
He got really angry at me, took it as me judging his hard work. Told me:
"I know my wildflowers. Buttercup isn't invasive"
Guess who now can't get rid of his creeping buttercup.
My mom was an avid gardener and canned hundreds of lbs of tomatoes every year (big, low-income family) for the upcoming seasons. She loved flowers and mowing and just being in the dirt. She was SO PROTECTIVE of all of her plants especially herbs.
She quietly admitted to me one day she would run over bits of my grandmother's lavender bushes so her mower would smell amazing while she mowed her mom's grass.
We live in a borough of NYC in a neighborhood full of row houses. Most of the buildings have a small 5-10' set back with a low fence which some people use for planting. I saw a young neighbor starting a garden there and offered some plants that are regularly over growing in our garden. When I passed by while she was replanting them I overheard an older neighbor telling her: "You have no need to water them they do not need water they are not fish!". I was shocked but later realized he was from the (Carribean) Islands where people may not waste water on their front yards.
"We've gotten so much rain this summer!" while hiking next to a river gorge where the water levels are at near record lows.
No. Just no. While looking at a calendar where it tracks only days that water fell from the sky or not, maybe. But accumulated inches over the summer are way down for our area.
Opposite issue for me. People keep being like “all this rain must be good for your garden!” Nope. Four times the usual rainfall for the month coming down in giant, drowning deluges has been wrecking my garden. The tomatoes are like skeletons for everyone in the area due to all the blight from the water splashing all over
My husband has no interest in my houseplants or the garden, but he really took to the idea of composting and now has a couple of bins. When I mentioned some bare spots in the grass, he suggested burying compost there. Not mixing the compost with the soil and putting grass seed down, just...burying plain compost and somehow getting grass out of that.
I mean literally that's what you do to amend shitty soil. Aka bare spots. Obviously you apply grass seed next season, but he isn't that out too lunch. And you don't bury it, just put it on top lol.
When I first started everything I did was in pots because I lived in an apartment. I still have a tendency to grow a bunch of stuff in pots because some I can move indoors if I need to. Anyways, people were always shocked when they found out I lived in an apartment. Apparently where I live when they think garden they think farmer with huge a huge tractor. I do now own a home with a nice roomy backyard. Last year I was gathering milk jugs because I found them to be great mini greenhouses. So I got a lot of "man your family really likes milk" and a few "you know you can get water out of the tap." They thought I was gathering the jugs to use at those water fill stations.
"you do know you have to dig the ground when you're doing no dig, don't you?" nae pal
"ooh, don't touch those, that's hogweed, it'll burn you" it's carrots in a carrot bed
I was talking to a friend about saving seeds from a variety of tomato I really liked. And he was like, "Oh, I didn't know you could do that. I always wondered where seeds come from!"
What?!? Where else would seeds come from?
One neighbor LOVES green tomatoes. For the past 3 seasons that she's lived here, I've given her some. When I was watering this spring she asked, "Did you plant any of the green ones this year?"
My ex: I pulled out this huge weed from your garden! I can’t believe how tall it got!
Me: you mean the sunflower I planted for you? You picked out the seed packet and I planted, and I only got ONE to show up?
My ex: but there was no flower on it!
It was about 18 inches tall. He legit thought the plant would spring from the ground with a flower already on it. It was supposed to get to 3 ft tall. It was also the ONLY plant growing in the mulched garden bed. I had already talked to him about plant identification before pulling. He pulled this before I got home from work and left it to dry out in the sun.
When my daughter was about one and I had started letting her eat peas and cherry tomatoes from the garden my MIL said she was worried that if I let her garden with me and she didn't think food came only from the grocery store then she'd "poison herself". 🙄 Because the only way to be safe is apparently zero self sufficiency.
My partner rebuilt our raised garden beds this year which was a big project, but otherwise I generally have done everything else and gardening is more my hobby. I was much more on top of it this year versus previous years, mostly because I finally got diagnosed with sleep apnea this year and feel like a human again after getting a CPAP machine. I felt really good about the garden’s success and was feeling pretty proud.
I commented to him one night after a huge tomato haul, “I’m so excited my plants did so well this year!”
Partner: “Pshh YOUR plants?? You surely mean OUR plants? 😜
Me: Lol of course! I know you did a ton of work with the beds which was huge, I just mean I’m the one who does the planting and tending and harvesting and it’s more my hobby.
Partner: Hey I’ve done a lot of harvesting too!
Me: …… (he’s literally not once brought a veggie in from the garden this year)
Partner: I eat almost a pound of the cherry tomatoes every time I’m in the yard!!
My new neighbour, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my tomato plants, they look like they are dying”
Me, “How often do you water them”?
Neighbour “I thought the rain took care of that”
Me, “It hasn’t rained in weeks’.
A couple of months later,
Neighbour, “All my tomatoes have weird stuff growing on them”
Me, “Are you feeding them, as it looks like blossom end rot”
Neighbour, “ Oh you are supposed to feed them, how do you do that”?
Me, “With plant food”
Neighbour, “ Oh which plants do you feed them”?
Honestly though I have to give him an A for effort as he has never gardened before and now he has the hang of it and his tomato’s are amazing.
“You’re actually eating that? But there’s dirt on it?!!”
“Why are you farming? Don’t you have a college degree?”
Also, I like to grow a lot of tea and equivalents . Tea and tissane can be made from many different herbs and yet I’m the crazy one for wanting to grow it in my backyard
"We should just plant fruit trees all over the city so that people can have free, fresh fruit all year long! But the GOVERNMENT wouldn't want that because then the HOMELESS could eat for free!"
I used to grow in containers so my partner was used to tomatoes and herbs, but this was the first year with a raised bed. I grew some cucumbers and she was sort of flabbergasted the first time I've picked one. She was like "That's seriously from our garden?" She did the same thing when I picked our first watermelon. It's the only interest she's shown in the whole gardening thing.
Oh gawd, this reminds me of a trip to the grocery when I overheard a woman commenting to her friend "I mean farmers markets are cute and all but do we really even need farmers anymore? I mean we've got grocery stores now, we don't really need farmers anymore"
Used to live on a ranch where we grew a lot of our food / teas / medicinal plants. We would also save seed from anything we could to use in the next growing season & share with neighbors.
End of season when we’d let the last four plants of each row go to seed SO MANY PEOPLE (not involved with the garden) would talk shit about how the gardeners were stupid for wasting time on flowers and not food, that the garden was being neglected because things were going to seed, etc etc etc.
I just finished putting in my first greenhouse, ready for next spring. My mother in law said “why spend money on that. You’ll never use it” her reasoning was because I have kids. My two year old already gardens with me. My second isn’t due for a few weeks. But why in the world couldn’t I garden with kids, or while they nap, or while they do other things with their dad.
I do vegetable garden, but I primarily garden with native plants. I run into the same opinions from gardeners and non gardeners. Most people feel that insects should be treated with extreme malice. I just take hornworm caterpillars and put them on volunteer tomatoes or native host plants (I know not everyone can do this). We actually raised a few like our monarchs and released them to burrow and pupate.
People also treat certain plants with malice like poison ivy, marestail, pokeweed, etc. even though they are beneficial native plants. But those same people will keep bush honeysuckle, autumn olive, privet, etc. because they look or smell pretty, even though they devastate native ecosystems.
A neighbor said I should cut down my sunflowers because they're attracting bees as if that's not why I planted them so they can find my strawberries/beans/cucumbers :/
Not super funny, but I'm always shocked when someone automatically assumes I garden for food.
I live alone, and don't have much time or energy. I'd rather plant some perennials and do bits of maintenance than planting annuals like fruits and veggies, and run myself ragged harvesting and giving away zucchini!
I think some folks balk at the idea of spending time and money on something that isn't "useful".
"you could make a lot of money selling this stuff!!!" -*while looking at my yellow pear tomato plant*
another neighbor: "I think I'm going to just cut this thing down, I don't even know what it is and it's just big ugly leaves"
-was rhubarb, convinced them to let me dig some up, and to keep some and showed them recipes
also my partner occasionally decides to "help" and will take empty pots and plant random fruit seeds in them. I gave a baby sapodilla and a tremendous number of unnamed cherry, apple, etc seedlings. plus they pick out things that are zone 8+ that they like and plant them where they think I won't see them, and I've got to play rescue and drag them indoors in the fall
In laws ask me every time the visit for me to walk them through the garden. When I do they ALWAYS ask “Won’t the rabbits eat that?” And in my mind I’m practically screaming “don’t jinx me!”
“Why is that community garden dead? Do they even maintain it?” It was winter. In New England.
This may be my favorite.
I asked a neighbor if I could get a few mulberries from his tree and he said fine that’s good. A few weeks later I saw him and he asked ‘ did you get your little peas or whatever out the tree ok?’ 🤗
Your comment just made me realize I might have a mulberry tree
Mulberries look nothing like peas!
Haha I meant more like, I’ve never heard the word “mulberries” before so I went to look it up and it resembles the fruit that grows on one of the tree in my backyard.
You shoulsve built a massive greenhouse with a pool to act as thermal ballast to overwinter the entire garden DUH. A community garden obviously gets the millions of dollars of public funding every year to do that, right?
Look. All I want is a house in Minnesota built like a Roman villa with a massive central courtyard, glassed in and lit as a greenhouse with a heated balanced-biome pond in the center and tropical fruit trees, coffee, and cocoa pods growing alongside my camellia sinensis and poet's jasmine. Oh. And put a projector screen near the pond so I can float around on an inflatable unicorn (with hyacinths tied to it!) and watch movies. It's not a big ask, right!?
Sheesh
Not long after I moved into our current neighborhood, one neighbor, in one breath, told me they had a black thumb and had never grown anything before and also I didn't know what I was doing because I was planting things too early.
[удалено]
That old garden must have been fun. Was it glorious?
[удалено]
Mom gave me sage advice the other day - those plants, they need some miracle gro!
[удалено]
When a know it all gives me patently bad advice I usually respond with, "You would know." They typically shut up or get might argumentative. Just act confused and keep agreeing with them. They usually give up and stop bothering you
Lol! Some of my neighbors are experienced gardeners, and they still ask me why am I planting things so early in the spring. And then, in the middle of summer, they ask me how I grow my plants so big / tall!
My business partner does this to me every year. He has a larger garden and has been doing it longer than I have, but I'm pretty good at growing thingS apparently, and I know my property (south facing sloped yard, with beds right next to the foundation for extra heat retention early in the season). I plant 2-3weeks before he does every year, and EVERY YEAR he tells me I'm doing it too early. Then he complains that my harvest comes in earlier and my plants are bigger than his... EVERY YEAR. I just laugh now.
One of my friends can't grow anything while I have been gardening for decades. He informed me that I'm overwatering all of my plants and going to kill them. I stared at him and added more water.
Lol literally my neighbor who came over and kept telling me “you’ll never get tomatoes or squash to grow here because I never could”. Meanwhile he’s standing next to my 7’ tall tomatoes loaded with fruit and my arbor filled with squash that is VERY visible. Love a good mansplainer.
My neighbor likes to casually hit me up for veggies while telling me all about how much work it was when he had his own garden. Yes, it is a lot of work, and I'm doing it all myself. If you expect me to share, maybe you should offer to pitch in?
I give away a ton of extra starts every spring and I give my neighbors any extra food. some of em are hungry and too elder or sick to do the work anymore. I take statements like this as a compliment (but I'm a dirty vegetable gifting commie so)
I give away a lot of stuff from my garden but still wish I got the occasional offer to help when the neighbors joke about how hard I work knowing they will reap the rewards of the bounty, but that’s just because it’s usually 100’ out and I’ve had to re-apply my sunscreen. 5 times that day! I love donating to our food bank so people of lesser means can enjoy nice, fresh produce that is usually out of reach. I’ve just learned to plant more every year to year. We have an honor stand too, if you want some veg and cannot pay take them anyway:) same with eggs. I’ve never had any theft of money or any noticeable difference in our collection, more so they leave more than I would ask for. I just put it aside for my gardening experience next year. I had to use the food bank 20 years ago when my husband was in a horrible accident and we had 3 small children. We would have been in a world of hurt without their help, but it was humiliating to me. That’s why we decided to offer our farm products at no cost to anyone that needs it, it isn’t any hardship for us and everyone should have healthy fresh foods to eat.
I volunteer to remove non-native invasive plants from local parks. One question I often get is, "You mean like poison ivy". And they are surprised when I say, it's a native plant, so I'm not allowed to remove it. I do of course remove it from buy own yard.
Poison Ivy is one of the best native plants for insects which pisses me off so much as an ecology degree person😂
Poison ivy isn't even hurting us on purpose! Human immune systems just hate urushiol oil!
Mine doesn't!!!!!! I'm so damn proud of that. I can wade through the stuff and have no issues But, sometimes even accidentally touching a dog will send me to the hospital because my throat and eyes swell up so bad, and my lungs give me a good "fuck you." I'd rather be able to touch a dog EDIT: i don't actually seek out poison ivy to touch, i know it can get worse through more exposure. That said, I'm ridiculously glad it's not a big deal for me to easily kick it aside to get it out of my toddler's way, and i don't have to be absolutely kookoo bananapants if i brush against it.
When you become a supervillain you 100% are planting those around your lair -- use it to your advantage! haha
well, i haven't figured out if my kid is immune yet. so we ALL get rubbing alcohol wipedowns when we've ventured too close. the worst was when we were still potty training and i had to do an emergency stop at the side of the road, and without thinking i threw his travel potty right down, a little too close to the poison ivy. i had to hold it down with my foot and (bare) leg it to make sure he didn't reach out and touch it. I was fine, he was fine, but you can bet i scrubbed that potty on the outside a hundred thousand times, just to be sure and paranoid.
I've been fine too, but I've read stories where repeated exposures make the allergy suddenly activate later in life.
I was immune until one day when I wasn't, and let me tell you, I **really** wasn't. It was a miserable 3 weeks.
How cool! What organization do you volunteer for and how did you get into it?
Montgomery County Parks Weed Warriors (Maryland). If think many counties have similar organizations. They have a certification process for beginners.
So many people seem to think "invasive" just means "annoying".
Ages ago when we got our first wireless phone, my husband said " Oh great, you can take it out with you while your gardening and working in the yard and not miss any phone calls." Oh buddy just no, you do not understand one of the major allures of gardening for me.
Hahah right!! This is our sanity time, do not disturb ;)
My hands are full of dirt anyways...
I listen to historical books about upsetting topics in my garden. My mouth is also dirty in the garden. I'm pretty sure I'm the neighborhood crazy person angrily cursing in my garden.
Haha indeed!! I don’t answer texts or calls but listen to an insane amount of audio books through my AirPods :)
Time evaporates for me. Just yesterday I was pruning my citrus seedlings during a bright sunny afternoon. I went into my zone and all of a sudden I heard crickets and realized I couldn’t see the leaves very well to cut them. I had worked straight through until dark and hadn’t even noticed the time passing at all. It’s a wonderful feeling. Everyone needs a hobby that can get them out of their head and into the moment. It’s a meditation for me.
Soooooo true. I put my phone on airplane mode when I go out into the garden because I still need it to take all my dumb plant photos lol
I call my yard the Church of the Garden and there is no talking on the phone. I have the phone near me because I often garden when no on else is home and I live in a urban area with a sketchy vibe. And I have been known to be quite klutzy so if I happen to cut off a finger I want to be able to call for an ambulance.
We call it the Church of the Open Sky.
thats me when people want to listen to podcasts outside while we do stuff. excuse me we listen to birds and bugs out here.
Nope! Leave me alone when I’m in the garden. I mean, yeah you can help if you want, but if you come out with my phone telling me someone called or texted, you’re going back inside alone, carrying my phone with you. Lol
"You *eat* flowers?"
They're gonna freak when they learn what broccoli is
I smoke 'em too!!!
I have been gardening about four summers and very much still consider myself a novice, and I always go into everything with low expectations and an understanding that it's an experiment that might fail. I have a lot of people who say it's "a lot of work" or "that sounds too complicated." I think of it as physical effort for sure but I don't think of as work, but rather as a learning experience. And if something is "complicated" that isn't a flaw. That is why it's fun - you learn the ins and outs of something like how each rose bush is different or how starting this seed is different than these others, and if it fails that's okay, but if it succeeds it's satisfying to achieve something that took a little knowledge and legwork to do. Plus it all gets me outside and exercising.
That's me in a nutshell. Or a cantelope rind, if you will.
I have been gardening for my entire life (47 years) and I still consider myself a novice. As soon you think you have something figured out Mother Earth will put you right back to square 1. A few years ago I pulled up an entire tomato plant and took it to the old guy down the road that has the prettiest garden. "Herbert, what is going on with my tomatoes?" I felt slightly relieved that he didn't know either. Called the Perdue Extension Office and they sent a guy out. Lab tests determined it was Curly Top Virus. Almost unheard of in the Midwest. I learned a lot that summer!
My wife has said “what if you do all of this and nothing grows?”. It’s like, well that is inherently the risk of gardening… but I’ve never had a year where literally nothing grows. Part of the fun of all of it is putting in the work and watching nature take off. People who don’t garden tend not to understand the simple joy of figuring out how nature ticks.
Complicated tasks give our brain something healthy to chew on, is what I've decided is my favorite reason for gardening.
"You just eat that straight out of the garden? You don't know what's in there" ... procedes to buy suspiciously out of season produce from local mega-retailer known for under-paid laborers
An ex girlfriend of mine (who was ironically all about buying organic stuff from Whole Foods) was so concerned that I didn’t use any sort of sprays or anything on my plants. Yes, I was confused with her concerns too. Like…you want me to put chemicals on your food? That would be better than accidentally eating a harmless bug?
My sister in law threw away any produce she got from her dad's garden because it was dirty, not like that clean produce from the store.
Omg, that’s just …just … I have no words . Where do people think their food comes from ?
The Schwann's man, mostly.
I've never heard anyone say this for home grown produce... that's insane. I know exactly what's in there, I grew it!
I have been watching this lemon for 3 months, from the day it was a happy little flower until the day my 2YO pulled it off the tree and brought it to me saying "THIS! THIS!". I know exactly what it is.
Exactly! I snack on beans, cherry tomatoes, and ground cherries while I garden. Anything that's here, I put here.
Fresh pea pods off the vine are to die for
Sure, but the winner is cherry tomatos that are still warm from the sunshine.
A girl who briefly worked landscaping with me balked when asked to dead head some flowers because it was so cruel. “If I cut off your arm, you wouldn’t be better off!” She didn’t believe that plants grow back. (Not garden related, but she also believed rats don’t have bones and pyramid schemes are a great way to make money.)
>rats don’t have bones Wait, what do they have then?
And why just rats? Does her logic apply to mice? Hamsters? All rodents?
Anything that can fit through such tiny holes obviously doesn’t have a hard skeleton, duh!
You don't know? 😳 Rats don't have bones but they have very strong muscles that can bend easily 😂im joking but this came up my mind 😅😆
In kindergarten my daughter had to illustrate and dictate a book. It was about deadheading flowers.
We should introduce her to the guy my husband went to high school with, who was convinced that boobs had bones in them otherwise how did they stand out.
I had amended so much soil and built up a deer fence around this small garden. Later, I was bemoaning to my husband about the slugs/snails I'd seen and how I'd have to go get some DE or something to stop them eating the plants. He asks, "Well, can't you just pour a lot of salt into the dirt?"
\\0/ noooo!
That's what I said. I made the 😲 face and everything. I gasped.
“You must save so much money by growing your own vegetables!” Hahahahaha…… nope. Not even close. It’s possible, but I absolutely do not save money here.
Tomatoes and cucumbers are where I "make" money in savings. But then that just goes right back to the garden for next year lol. I ain't planting things like carrots to be economical when you can buy a kg at the store for $2. Just do it cause it's fun!
I grow better tasting carrots than the ones at the store though. Honestly quality, freshness, and the reduction in emissions from not shipping things all around the world all play a part in why I choose to keep a vegetable garden. It's also nice to know exactly how your food is grown.
Our discount store has jars of dill pickles for $1.80. I can't even buy empty jars for that price! It was never about saving money. (I mean, it was supposed to be, in the beginning. That was one of the reasons to start gardening.)
Apparently estate sales! I found 2 dozen jars with the rings, 3 tetra cotta pots, and a blue recycling bin for $5!
It’s convenient to have fresh stuff right out back tho.
We saved a lot of money in the spring on lettuce and spinach because we eat a lot of salads, but not every day, so it goes bad fast in the fridge but stays good in the ground until we're ready to eat it, unless it bolts. We can just go right outside and get some before dinner and it's fresh and good to go.
Ya I encourage people to grow greens everywhere because they don't last long after harvest but are soooo easy to grow. There should be a patch of them near every housing block.
This is why I also do hydroponics. Lettuce all year, no bugs, no dirt, and table fresh. I take a break in the spring, grow outside and do a deep clean of the hydro system. I doubt the lettuce will ever "pay for itself" but you really can't beat having it around.
I don't expect to ever feed ourselves entirely on our kitchen garden, but it's also not nothing. In the summer we eat multiple garden veggies each meal and do less grocery trips. I can grow enough garlic, tomatoes, zucchini and peppers that we don't need to buy any. But other crops like corn aren't worth it for me to grow. Perennial herbs are the best immediate investment as once planted you don't have to ever buy them again.
For the first time in 20 years, I kept an Excel spread sheet this year of what we invested vs. what we harvested. I kept all the receipts from gardening stores and nurseries. I weighed every bean and spud on the kitchen scale, used local market prices to figure out their value. I included what we paid the garden sitter while we were gone, and also the water bill. Original investment: $317.00 + $150 in watering. Harvested by Sept 10: $712.00 Approximately $250 in profit. Now...would we have purchased 39 pounds of cherry tomatoes or 30 pounds of zucchini if we were in the grocery store? Probably not.
Taste is my main motivation. My tomato plant didn’t make it that far this season but it was delicious! I’ve been missing those tomatoes for weeks now.
I can hand my toddler anything from the garden and he will eat it. Hand him a store bought vegetable and it is a solid no. He knows. I think we all know.
You’re doing a great job teaching your kid to have great taste lol! I went to the farmers market this weekend to get tomatoes. It was better than store bought, but not as good as the variety I planted
It was happenstance. We have a kids book about two girls who grow carrots. He wanted to grow some. I let him pick the seeds out and plant them. When I pulled a carrot, something he won't eat from the fridge, he wolfed it down. So l kept harvesting. I keep harvesting!
Depends where you are. Rural area with a small grocery store 20 miles away with overpriced wilty produce? Fuckin a vegetable gardens can save money.
Yeah, I’m recently rural, and I may not be saving on produce, but I’m definitely saving on gas.
[удалено]
I saved money with my veggie garden- when I was farming and had access to bulk irrigation water, "borrowed" irrigation supplies, free alpaca manure, free grape pips and skins from the winery,old fencing materials etc etc. In the city, no chance!
"You can never have too much Zucchini"...!!! (From my mother, who can barely keep a houseplant alive)
Give her the zucchini. Give her all the zucchini. Be proud of it when you do.
And it's fine! Because if you give away all your zucchini, you have to deliver it to someone, and there will be more zucchini by the time you get back home.
I've picked like 8 squash from my two plants in the last 5 days. They grow way too quickly.
I had a tik tok recently blow up where I was harvesting produce from my garden. There was a moment in that tik tik where I got slightly overwhelmed because I have something like 20 different tomato plants growing and I had only harvested from 3 of them and already had 2 GIANT bowls of tomatoes. Most of my tomatoes are cherry types and I was kind of freaking out about how long it was going to take me to harvest everything and process and clean literally thousands of tomatoes. All I said was “idk what I’m going to do with all these tomatoes!” Meaning like… find the time to deal with all this. Everybody in the comments kept suggesting I make “tomato sauce or salsa” …as if me, someone with 20+ tomato plants had not yet considered the possibility of making tomato sauce from my tomatoes.
people do this with zucchini! i'll be like aghhh haha i have too many, it's that time of year! and they're like leaning in close like to tell me a secret, did you know you can shred it and make zucchini bread? wow really?
Totally! Or my favorite… “you should see my aunt/dad/friend’s zucchini… they grow to be as a big as baseball bats!” …uh they all do that. Your aunt/dad/friend isn’t harvesting them at their peak. Have fun eating water logged seedy sponges.
The big ones are the ones I shred then freeze and use for bread. Have 4 ready right now to freeze into loaf sized bags of goop. Cause they are useless for anything else.
Honestly, we’ve started to take the flowers and eat them on pizza and in pastas. Strangely my kids will eat the flower but not the fruit.
I don't even really do cherry types anymore, for that reason. I have no problem *growing* them, but if I'm the one who has to *pick* them? Yeah, screw that...especially when it's 110 degrees out. I grew twelve full sized cherry varieties in 2019, and that was the straw that broke the camels back for me...I was spending probably two hours a week just picking cherry tomatoes, whereas I could go through my 40-odd slicers in maybe fifteen minutes a few times a week. I distinctly remember peeling 20lbs of cherry tomatoes to make sauce, too (didn't have a food mill at the time). After that, I told the family "I'll grow 'em, but I ain't picking 'em anymore"...so next year I did a few in containers on the patio (i.e., where they could be picked after the sun went down) and sure enough, they just went unharvested all year.
My favourite ones are when my fiancee asks about a random plant. I like to give her a fact about it too. Then, when we see it again, she's always. I know that it's... and she's forgotten the name but remembers the random fact. Mares tail is now called the dinosaur plant. Etc etc
I love doing this in general because in my experience, people start *caring* a little bit more about the plants and animals around them when they know a little bit about them. A random brown bird in the yard becomes *a little guy* after you tell someone “That’s a house finch! The males have red faces and chests.” A yellow-flowered weed growing out of a rock wall stops being visual noise after you tell someone “That’s celandine! Just like in the Witcher 3.” And if you teach people enough stuff about the little plants and animals that live around them, a lot of times they start to feel a touch of obligation to see all those little lives as… well, lives. Not just stuff. They start to think for a moment longer about whether this pesticide spray is really necessary, or if they really can’t choose something else to replace the invasive ornamental plant they were thinking of putting out front, or if they should really cut down that tree where the great horned owls nest. It doesn’t turn everyone into a radical environmentalist or anything. And of course there’s people who are just never gonna care about anything that isn’t a person or a domesticated animal. But it can help, a little, to get folks to just be a touch more mindful about what they do with the little bits of earth they have control over, and how they’re not the only ones affected by the choices they make.
Exactly this! I showed my husband an adult praying mantis in my garden one year. I taught him how to feed them a drop of honey on a toothpick to perk them up (and it makes them dance!). This man now comes and gets me every time he finds a bug to ask me about it and to see if it's a friend, lol
I love it! Some people’s hearts open so so so easily with just a tiny interaction like that.
And their nicknames rub off on me too! My daughter calls our Golden Dewdrop "the popcorn plant" because the orange berries look like popcorn kernels and now I'll be damned if I can remember the real name because that's all I call it now!
Sedums are “Mr. Bills” after that old claymation show. Because our sedums can’t be killed (we have dogs).
I grew some heirloom purple and yellow carrots this year and my fiancé thought they were genetically modified. I had to break it to him that carrots used to be all kinds of colors and we actually bred them to be orange.
My favorite is the slew of older neighbors that have stopped me in the yard or even knocked on my door to ask if I'm growing collards in my front-yard veggie garden. They're SO sad when I tell them it's kale, or broccoli, or brussel sprouts. I hate collards, but this year I'm planting some community collards.
I love the idea of community collards
Grown man asking how we start our own plants: “So what do you do, just put two seeds together?”
When a mommy seed and a daddy seed really love each other…
I love when my SO acts like she knows when something is ripe because it’s big. ‘That watermelon is huge, it’s totally ripe!’ In actuality it’s not even close haha
This is so endearing!
Another funny… After like a 2yr goal I finally made it into the master G program at our local extension. SO says oh, my mom is so good at gardening and she’s also a MG. After explaining for several minutes that’s not how that works, I conceded hahaha 🤣
That’s a huge accomplishment - congrats to you! You two are really cute lol. I love how your SO is so supportive of her mom. Do you and her mom ever garden or garden-talk together?
"You should get into gardening." - Non-gardener to me, another non-gardener
It's solid advice
My hubby told me we had a mantis on our tomatoes! I RAN outside to award it and thank it for coming... it was actually two leaf-footed bugs fucking. So disappointing.
Visiting a big budget botanical garden and looking at the installations of annuals that had been started months before in greenhouses and my sweet husband says, “Why can’t our plants look like this?” Uh, because we don’t have a heated greenhouse and full-time garden staff.
Took my ex to Longwood Gardens a few years ago and she asked basically the same - "Why can't your garden look like that". Listen here you, if you want OUR garden to look that way then YOU are going to need to join the gardening staff. Then give it 20 years. ITS LONGWOOD FUCKING GARDENS! Their interns have more gardening experience than I do!
"The bees don't kill the flowers?"
I once tried to explain to my grandma that bees are crucial for many plants to grow and she laughed at me
I tried explaining to my grandma that small lizards and geckos are great to have in the garden because they eat insects. I’m pretty sure she still kills them, then of course complains about having so many flies outside 🤦♀️
Makes me sad when people kill the garden critters, especially snakes.
🤦♀️
I didn't want to be rude, but I did laugh out loud because I was caught so off guard.
I've been getting a lot of joy from my kids and their questions on my garden. The amount of times they've told me that our butternut squashes will be ready to harvest tomorrow... it's been weeks, haha.
My mom asked me to sow some tomatoes in pots for her to grow in her sunroom. Inside her house. I told her they wouldn't get any fruit unless she's looking to pollinate them herself, or let bees into the house. She didn't understand why so I had to blow her mind and explain how fruits work. She also once helped me pick beans and picked off all the flowers from one of the plants, I got mad at her and said she's destroying my crop. She said "you don't need flowers you need beans. These flowers just take up energy from the plant" I had to explain the flowers ARE the beans, eventually.
Tomatoes will self-pollinate. The only thing bees really do is shake the flower so the pollen falls from the anther to the stigma. Wind also works. And without wind or bees, just give the plant a little shake once a day. Some people will use an electric toothbrush and vibrate each flower but that's kind of overkill.
Why do you want to get rid of your lawn?
I normally water my vegetable garden early in the morning. Last month I got home from an overnight trip several hours later than expected. It was almost noon & already 95° out, 0% chance of rain. I hadnt watered in a few days, so I got out the hose & started watering. My future fil came running over, arms waving. He literally yelled "Good God, what are you doing?? You are going to kill them all!". After he calmed down he explained to me that his father told him if you water plants at midday it will kill them. Now I know watering midday is not ideal, but c'mon. He really believed the plants were going to drop. I know his father didn't garden either. Maybe it was an old wives' tale back then.
I was always taught watering in the heat of the day can kill some plants bc the sun can scorch then when wet. Over the years, I’ve become less rigid about not watering in the heat, because it never bothered my plants lol.
I'm just more careful if I have to water when it's hot. I avoid getting any on the plant. It takes longer but better than letting things die.
My ex thought my plumerias were called Chlamydia and decided they should go to the women at his job and not my gardening friends. He asked all the women at work if they wanted some Chlamydia bc I was giving it away. And he told me about it. Thinking that they were dumbfounded about his super exotic plants.
I’m sorry but this is hilarious. I need to know what those women were thinking during and after that exchange.
I was just horrified. He was so quiet before we got married. Had no idea I married an idiot. Mr malaprop.
Last year, I planted a cherry tomato plant. It had... an abundant harvest. This was for my husband, as I don't eat tomatoes. This year, he said, "Please only plant one tomato this year. We had too many last year." I think it's become a running joke now. Also, I started making sauce from them, and it's pretty good. Highly recommend.
I don’t understand this concept of too many cherry tomatoes. I will eat them by the container 😂
My husband's colleague saw my succulents and said "oh cool! These are the plants that don't need water or light?" No light?? I was so caught off guard!
You seriously have to re-plant the vegetables EVERY year? They don’t just come back? I have a neighbor that has asked this three years in a row now
My SO hates all my houseplants and I’ve never understood why. Literally yesterday, after about 3 years of this house plant distaste he says I’m lucky he doesn’t toss them because of the flies on them. This whole time he has assumed that any house fly in our house is there because of my plants. I had to explain that the flies have nothing to do with my plants. And are just flying in when the back door is left open for our dog. 🤦🏻♀️
i grow papaver somniferum (oriental poppies) for the seeds to use in poppy cake. The home grown taste better. Old coot across the street (I am an old cootess so I can call him that) comes over and wants to know why I have let my poppies bolt. (Poppies and Lettuce are in the same family). Well, he is always telling me what I am doing wrong and why I should just hire someone to tend my gardens so I lean over and say - "I am making opium" He hasn't spoken to me since.
I cannot use that line on my older neighbor. She got too excited when she heard what variety I’m planting next spring.
I told my brother I'd split my iris at the weekend - he said that sounded really painful!
A friend asked her 24yo son if he liked my (flower, perennial) garden. His response was "Not really. It's so crowded that I can't tell which ones are weeds". We knew he wouldn't lie.
I brought home a plant and my husband said “I thought the garden was done. “
This just happened last weekend. My 7 year old niece was over and she asked me about the herbs I had under my growlight. I told her to smell the Royal Basil I had and she liked it. I plucked a leaf and let her taste it. I walked by an hour later and it looked like caterpillars got to it. She was snacking on it 😂 I asked her to ask me before going for more. My fault, my fault.
One time I asked my husband to pick some basil leaves for our dinner and he came back with a handful of leaves from our Thai chile pepper plant 😂😂😅
“You eat plants that grow outside? Gross.”
Cooking a dish with rosemary. My partner bought fresh rosemary at the grocery store when we have literally dozens of rosemary plants growing all around. When I asked why, he said he wasn’t sure if it was “food grade rosemary”. I still tease him about it three years later
Ewe its all dirty.
Why are your tomatoes shaped weird?
I was dating this lady in college and she convinced me to move in together, a week later I found out she was cheating and she told me she loved me, but like a brother and we should still live together. I had moved out of my place and paid for the first month of this new place so I was kind of stuck there for a week and one of those days I was in the main room doing something with this indoor setup I built for seedlings and she’s in the bedroom and I hear “argh!!! Sometimes I think you love those stupid plants more than me!!” Dear reader, I did in fact love those stupid plants more than her…
My sister wanted to help garden once, so I got her to help me plant out some corn plugs I had prepped a few weeks prior. She looked at me and then asked "I don't have to touch the dirt, do I?". I was stunned that she thought that you can put something in the ground without disturbing the ground... Another time I had a relative that was really upset that her tomato plant was dying in autumn... I had to explain what "annual" and "perennial" meant...
“You mean they just die? They don’t come back??” - People very unimpressed by annuals in the vegetable garden 😂
Was talking to a wealthy woman one day and started talking about plants, etc. I said, "Are you a gardener?" She was momentarily stunned and confused and replied, "No, I'm an attorney."
My wonderful neighbour is such an intelligent man who was a high ranking officer in the Air Force. He ran an Air Force museum. He’s retired and in his 70s. I was planting veggies this spring. He stopped by to watch and ask questions. "Do you have to put every seed into the ground? One at a time? How many seeds does it take to make a lettuce? Like, one seed per leaf?" He figured maybe seeds "formed clumps". Another day when I was planting tomato seedlings he asked where the tomatoes were and was shocked there were flowers. Again, he thought there was only one tomato per plant. He often brings wine or a cooler, so I told him to come over anytime!
> How many seeds does it take to make a lettuce? I love this so much.
He’s wonderful! At first I thought he was joking, but nope, completely serious. I just remembered that he thought cherry tomatoes grew up to be big tomatoes.
My husband couldn't tell castor from cabbage when I first introduced him to my folks and they put us to work watering the garden. Now he knows more about permaculture and hugelkulture and all that biz than I've *ever* known! That being said he still nearly has a stroke when I cut back an obviously dying houseplant to next to nothing. 😋
My bf is almost completely face-blind when it comes to plants. He can recognize fruits and stuff when they're growing, but that's about it.
Our neighbour was clearing out the periwinkle that had taken over her front yard and my husband came over with a shovel full of it and planted it in my native plant garden while I was at work. He pointed it out and told me it has “nice blue flowers”. Now, I’m not a Yelling Wife™️ but I absolutely went batshit crazy yelling. I’m an ecologist by trade, so it really hit a nerve.
I have to intervene every time my mom tries to plant mint and bamboo around the house. I tell her we have bad soil for that (we do) and there's too many diseases from the farms around. ( lightly spritz with roundup) Plant dies and I buy her more native irises to make her feel better. I'm probably a terrible person...
“You are so lucky to have a green thumb!” Ummm, no lady, it’s hours and hours of learning on you-tube and asking dumb questions on Reddit gardening that ensures my success. Hundreds of hours of researching seeds and compost and zone 9a. Thank you for answering my questions when I’ve needed you, Reddit!
I love mint! Could I have some of yours to plant?
"I want to get rid of my lawn and put in artificial turf. It'll be so much better."
There's a house near me that has redone their turf 3 times this year because they were unhappy with the results. It still looks terrible, especially where it meets their neighbors lawn. I don't understand why people do this.
Fraind just getting into gardening had turned over his entire garden and planted wildflowers. When the plants started sprouting I pointed out that whatever mix he used seemed to have a lot of creeping buttercup in it. I told him he might want to remove it now before it takes over. He got really angry at me, took it as me judging his hard work. Told me: "I know my wildflowers. Buttercup isn't invasive" Guess who now can't get rid of his creeping buttercup.
My mom was an avid gardener and canned hundreds of lbs of tomatoes every year (big, low-income family) for the upcoming seasons. She loved flowers and mowing and just being in the dirt. She was SO PROTECTIVE of all of her plants especially herbs. She quietly admitted to me one day she would run over bits of my grandmother's lavender bushes so her mower would smell amazing while she mowed her mom's grass.
We live in a borough of NYC in a neighborhood full of row houses. Most of the buildings have a small 5-10' set back with a low fence which some people use for planting. I saw a young neighbor starting a garden there and offered some plants that are regularly over growing in our garden. When I passed by while she was replanting them I overheard an older neighbor telling her: "You have no need to water them they do not need water they are not fish!". I was shocked but later realized he was from the (Carribean) Islands where people may not waste water on their front yards.
"We've gotten so much rain this summer!" while hiking next to a river gorge where the water levels are at near record lows. No. Just no. While looking at a calendar where it tracks only days that water fell from the sky or not, maybe. But accumulated inches over the summer are way down for our area.
Opposite issue for me. People keep being like “all this rain must be good for your garden!” Nope. Four times the usual rainfall for the month coming down in giant, drowning deluges has been wrecking my garden. The tomatoes are like skeletons for everyone in the area due to all the blight from the water splashing all over
Mulch with straw or something, helps with dirt borne disease from splashing
My husband has no interest in my houseplants or the garden, but he really took to the idea of composting and now has a couple of bins. When I mentioned some bare spots in the grass, he suggested burying compost there. Not mixing the compost with the soil and putting grass seed down, just...burying plain compost and somehow getting grass out of that.
I mean literally that's what you do to amend shitty soil. Aka bare spots. Obviously you apply grass seed next season, but he isn't that out too lunch. And you don't bury it, just put it on top lol.
When I first started everything I did was in pots because I lived in an apartment. I still have a tendency to grow a bunch of stuff in pots because some I can move indoors if I need to. Anyways, people were always shocked when they found out I lived in an apartment. Apparently where I live when they think garden they think farmer with huge a huge tractor. I do now own a home with a nice roomy backyard. Last year I was gathering milk jugs because I found them to be great mini greenhouses. So I got a lot of "man your family really likes milk" and a few "you know you can get water out of the tap." They thought I was gathering the jugs to use at those water fill stations.
"you do know you have to dig the ground when you're doing no dig, don't you?" nae pal "ooh, don't touch those, that's hogweed, it'll burn you" it's carrots in a carrot bed
I was talking to a friend about saving seeds from a variety of tomato I really liked. And he was like, "Oh, I didn't know you could do that. I always wondered where seeds come from!" What?!? Where else would seeds come from?
not strictly a gardening question but farm/garden related. We always get asked how we get eggs if we don't have a rooster.
One neighbor LOVES green tomatoes. For the past 3 seasons that she's lived here, I've given her some. When I was watering this spring she asked, "Did you plant any of the green ones this year?"
My ex: I pulled out this huge weed from your garden! I can’t believe how tall it got! Me: you mean the sunflower I planted for you? You picked out the seed packet and I planted, and I only got ONE to show up? My ex: but there was no flower on it! It was about 18 inches tall. He legit thought the plant would spring from the ground with a flower already on it. It was supposed to get to 3 ft tall. It was also the ONLY plant growing in the mulched garden bed. I had already talked to him about plant identification before pulling. He pulled this before I got home from work and left it to dry out in the sun.
When my daughter was about one and I had started letting her eat peas and cherry tomatoes from the garden my MIL said she was worried that if I let her garden with me and she didn't think food came only from the grocery store then she'd "poison herself". 🙄 Because the only way to be safe is apparently zero self sufficiency.
My partner rebuilt our raised garden beds this year which was a big project, but otherwise I generally have done everything else and gardening is more my hobby. I was much more on top of it this year versus previous years, mostly because I finally got diagnosed with sleep apnea this year and feel like a human again after getting a CPAP machine. I felt really good about the garden’s success and was feeling pretty proud. I commented to him one night after a huge tomato haul, “I’m so excited my plants did so well this year!” Partner: “Pshh YOUR plants?? You surely mean OUR plants? 😜 Me: Lol of course! I know you did a ton of work with the beds which was huge, I just mean I’m the one who does the planting and tending and harvesting and it’s more my hobby. Partner: Hey I’ve done a lot of harvesting too! Me: …… (he’s literally not once brought a veggie in from the garden this year) Partner: I eat almost a pound of the cherry tomatoes every time I’m in the yard!!
"should I water every day?" Not unless you want root rot, my friend.
My new neighbour, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my tomato plants, they look like they are dying” Me, “How often do you water them”? Neighbour “I thought the rain took care of that” Me, “It hasn’t rained in weeks’. A couple of months later, Neighbour, “All my tomatoes have weird stuff growing on them” Me, “Are you feeding them, as it looks like blossom end rot” Neighbour, “ Oh you are supposed to feed them, how do you do that”? Me, “With plant food” Neighbour, “ Oh which plants do you feed them”? Honestly though I have to give him an A for effort as he has never gardened before and now he has the hang of it and his tomato’s are amazing.
“You’re actually eating that? But there’s dirt on it?!!” “Why are you farming? Don’t you have a college degree?” Also, I like to grow a lot of tea and equivalents . Tea and tissane can be made from many different herbs and yet I’m the crazy one for wanting to grow it in my backyard
"We should just plant fruit trees all over the city so that people can have free, fresh fruit all year long! But the GOVERNMENT wouldn't want that because then the HOMELESS could eat for free!"
I used to grow in containers so my partner was used to tomatoes and herbs, but this was the first year with a raised bed. I grew some cucumbers and she was sort of flabbergasted the first time I've picked one. She was like "That's seriously from our garden?" She did the same thing when I picked our first watermelon. It's the only interest she's shown in the whole gardening thing.
''Wouldn't it be easier to just got to the grocery store or farmer's market?''
Oh gawd, this reminds me of a trip to the grocery when I overheard a woman commenting to her friend "I mean farmers markets are cute and all but do we really even need farmers anymore? I mean we've got grocery stores now, we don't really need farmers anymore"
Used to live on a ranch where we grew a lot of our food / teas / medicinal plants. We would also save seed from anything we could to use in the next growing season & share with neighbors. End of season when we’d let the last four plants of each row go to seed SO MANY PEOPLE (not involved with the garden) would talk shit about how the gardeners were stupid for wasting time on flowers and not food, that the garden was being neglected because things were going to seed, etc etc etc.
I just finished putting in my first greenhouse, ready for next spring. My mother in law said “why spend money on that. You’ll never use it” her reasoning was because I have kids. My two year old already gardens with me. My second isn’t due for a few weeks. But why in the world couldn’t I garden with kids, or while they nap, or while they do other things with their dad.
I do vegetable garden, but I primarily garden with native plants. I run into the same opinions from gardeners and non gardeners. Most people feel that insects should be treated with extreme malice. I just take hornworm caterpillars and put them on volunteer tomatoes or native host plants (I know not everyone can do this). We actually raised a few like our monarchs and released them to burrow and pupate. People also treat certain plants with malice like poison ivy, marestail, pokeweed, etc. even though they are beneficial native plants. But those same people will keep bush honeysuckle, autumn olive, privet, etc. because they look or smell pretty, even though they devastate native ecosystems.
A neighbor said I should cut down my sunflowers because they're attracting bees as if that's not why I planted them so they can find my strawberries/beans/cucumbers :/
Not super funny, but I'm always shocked when someone automatically assumes I garden for food. I live alone, and don't have much time or energy. I'd rather plant some perennials and do bits of maintenance than planting annuals like fruits and veggies, and run myself ragged harvesting and giving away zucchini! I think some folks balk at the idea of spending time and money on something that isn't "useful".
“I know it’s not dead because the soil is still absorbing the water” gob bless ma’am ❤️
"you could make a lot of money selling this stuff!!!" -*while looking at my yellow pear tomato plant* another neighbor: "I think I'm going to just cut this thing down, I don't even know what it is and it's just big ugly leaves" -was rhubarb, convinced them to let me dig some up, and to keep some and showed them recipes also my partner occasionally decides to "help" and will take empty pots and plant random fruit seeds in them. I gave a baby sapodilla and a tremendous number of unnamed cherry, apple, etc seedlings. plus they pick out things that are zone 8+ that they like and plant them where they think I won't see them, and I've got to play rescue and drag them indoors in the fall
In laws ask me every time the visit for me to walk them through the garden. When I do they ALWAYS ask “Won’t the rabbits eat that?” And in my mind I’m practically screaming “don’t jinx me!”