Addicted to Gardening

You Know You're Addicted to Gardening When....

* 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 (ok.. not me).
* Your boss makes "taking care of the office plants" an official part of your job description.
* 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 (ok, not me either).
* 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.(I will never be a palmolive commercial.)
* 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
* Planning for the next Garden