I think the critical thing to understand is that fertilizer is not needed for healthy growth in soil that is well conditioned through years of organic inputs. The key points to focus on is that most soils require years of organic inputs and we aren't talking about a light dusting with compost either. We are talking about modifying the soil so around 30+ percent is organic matter. We also aren't talking about growing award winning giant pumpkins in that soil, we are talking about plants that grow healthy and reasonably. Most trees, shrubs and perennials grow well in soils with low to moderate fertility and compost alone is more than capable of doing the job. Annuals grown for effect whether it be an ornamental flower or high yielding veggy will almost always benefit from understanding the plant's growth cycle and environmental requirements for not just good, healthy growth, but optimal yields and then meeting them. Some perennial plants grown for fruit also qualify. If one wants a nice looking yard full of healthy plants that do well, compost alone is sufficient. If one wants a 5lb tomato or a 1000# + pumpkin then one best start researching the plant's nutrient requirements and fertilizers that will optimally meet them.

Hello, All: I use the Neil Sperry gardening calendar and have done for 2 decades. Neil is an A&M-trained horticulturist who has had a radio program for 30+ years in the DFW Meteroplex and now has a monthly newsletter for all of Texas as well as the calendars and magazines. He's our Texas guru - the university research antithesis of the local, but also popular organic 'Dirt Doctor'. The calendars have a square for each day where I pencil in the temps and rain or whatever and the item(s) I'm focusing on that day. Of course, on busy gardening days I have to use a sort of shorthand, and for detailed analysis, I use a writing tablet of some sort and I save those. I like to go back years later and read one of my monthly reports from a garden walk-around. When I do that, I just jot down everything that occurs to me as I walk whether it's an observation of a plant or a note to myself to do better next time. What I really like about using the garden calender is that I can pick up a calendar for whatever year I want to refer to and turn to that month and see what was happening and compare it to what's happening in the current year. I can see when the ice storms hit and what damage was done and I can see how long a drought lasted and what I did about it. I can see when I sprayed for nutgrass and when it's time to spray again or when I started using Ornamec on the bermuda that crept into the liriope. I note when I took a tree out and what difference it made and how well the plants did with more sun or whether I had to rearrange the plants or replace them. I make a note of what kind of mulch I use and when I order bulk compost and how much. I can look back and remind myself what varieties I tried and when I lost them. : ( My calendars turn out to be kind of a table like Kay uses, but w/o as much detail and organized by month and day instead of location in the garden. I started getting the calendars because they came with my N.S. Texas Gardens magazine subscription, but as years went by, the calendars have come to mean much more to me than the magazine. I now want more detailed info than I can get in the magazine, and it's so easy to locate it online. I keep intending to punch holes in the calendars and put them in a binder and make a kind of book. (They're all the same size so this would be possible.) I've saved a couple of oversized binders for this, but I never can decide if I want to order the book by month or by year. As soon as I decide that I want to order my book by months (like having chapters of Januarys or Februarys, etc.) so I can flip through and see what happened in all years in the winter or summer or spring, I then realize that I really like being able to grab a calendar and see the progress of the garden from month to month for that particular year. Oh well. At the bottom of each month of calendar squares, Neil lists must-do garden tasks for particular areas of Texas as well as cautions and other reminders. This is not so valuable now that I've grown as a gardener and don't need the reminders. Now I'd rather have more space to write. But all in all, I'm really glad I have the calendars and have kept records. Here's the location of the calendars - I put the info in as a link, but haven't done that before and don't know if I'm doing it right. http://www.neilsperry.com/store/neil-sperrys-texas-gardening-calendar/neil-sperrys-2012-texas-gardening-calendar.html I've enjoyed learning what you all do or don't do. It probably reflects our various personalities and the business of our lives, and I feel I know you a little better. Lou Here is a link that might be useful: Neil Sperry's Texas Gardening Calendar

Oh, Ken! I love you. LOL I wrote out your answer in my head as I was posting mine. ;) I live on a quarter of an acre. Between me and my immediate neighbours (to the back and one side), and the wilderness area to the other side, there are over 50 tall pines surrounding my house. We have 17 or 18 or 19 on our property alone (the fudging in numbers comes with the fact that some of the trees aren't totally on our land). Add to that the sweet gum and the two lives oaks and the sourwood (still tiny, but destined to be big if it lives for long enough) I planted 2 years ago, and we have all sorts of things that could plummet woodily down on to our house. But the shade is amazing! :) I don't have any other cherries on my property, but there is a lot of wilderness within a mile of our house, so I'm sure they're around, and I'd way rather a weedy, enthusiastic native than an invasive. This wasn't a spot I was worrying about, but now that the tree is there, I'm okay with it. I'd half considered adding another viburnum here, and I might still add that in. I don't think it's necessarily something of value for me, but as esh says, it's valuable for wildlife and I value that. Thanks all! Yes, even Ken.

Saw the thread under "Most Recent Posts". Enjoy ........... Al I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view. ~H. Fred Dale (Thanks, Anne) Gardening requires lots of water ��" most of it in the form of perspiration. ~Lou Erickson What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. ~Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden, 1871 Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes. ~Author Unknown There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. ~Mirabel Osler Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it. ~Author Unknown In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them. ~Victoria Glendinning The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. ~George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, 1932 The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. ~Hanna Rion In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful. ~Abram L. Urban It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought. ~James Douglas, Down Shoe Lane Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. ~Marcelene Cox God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done. ~Author Unknown I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse Don't wear perfume in the garden ��" unless you want to be pollinated by bees. ~Anne Raver Plant carrots in January and you'll never have to eat carrots. ~Author Unknown Take thy plastic spade, It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants, They are thy colours. ~William Mason, The English Garden, 1782 It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. ~Robert Louis Stevenson Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity. ~Lindley Karstens, noproblemgarden.com I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds. ~Robert Bridges, "Testament of Beauty" To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves. ~Mahatma Gandhi Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden. ~Orson Scott Card In golden April weather, In sun and wind and rain, Let us fare forth and follow Beneath the spring's first swallow By budding break and heather To the good brown soil again! ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, "Invitation," Around the Year in the Garden, 1913 How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. ~Benjamin Disraeli Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing:��""Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade... ~Rudyard Kipling, "The Glory of the Garden" You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt. ~Author Unknown There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. ~Aldo Leopold I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful and uncertain spirit. ~Reginald Farrer, In a Yorkshire Garden, 1909 Plants cry their gratitude for the sun in green joy. ~Terri Guillemets The garden is the poor man's apothecary. ~German Proverb Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora. ~Ketzel Levine's talkingplants.com On every stem, on every leaf,... and at the root of everything that grew, was a professional specialist in the shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, whose business it was to devour that particular part. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. ~Mrs. C.W. Earle, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1897 (Thanks, Jessica) No two gardens are the same. No two days are the same in one garden. ~Hugh Johnson With rake and seeds and sower, And hoe and line and reel, When the meadows shrill with "peeping" And the old world wakes from sleeping, Who wouldn't be a grower That has any heart to feel? ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, "Invitation," Around the Year in the Garden, 1913 It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season. ~Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden We think that diamonds are very important, gold is very important, all these minerals are very important. We call them precious minerals, but they are all forms of the soil. But that part of this mineral that is on top, like it is the skin of the earth, that is the most precious of the commons. ~Wangari Maathai (1940��"2011), Dirt! The Movie, 2009 The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. ~Abraham Lincoln From an aunt, long ago: "Death has come for me many times but finds me always in my lovely garden and leaves me there, I think, as an excuse to return." ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. ~Evelyn Underhill, Letters Let nature be in your yard. ~Greg Peterson, www.urbanfarm.org A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself. ~May Sarton The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard. ~Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World Coffee. Garden. Coffee. Does a good morning need anything else? ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com Every radish I ever pulled up seemed to have a mortgage attached to it. ~Ed Wynn I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day. ~F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise. ~Michael P. Garofalo Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. ~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732 In order to live off a garden, you practically have to live in it. ~Frank McKinney Hubbard It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed. ~Walt Whitman Creating your own urban farm is as simple as planting your flowerbeds with edibles. ~Greg Peterson, My Ordinary Extraordinary Yard: The Story of the Urban Farm, 2009, www.urbanfarm.org In the garden I tend to drop my thoughts here and there. To the flowers I whisper the secrets I keep and the hopes I breathe. I know they are there to eavesdrop for the angels. ~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another. ~Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977 Gardens... should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves. ~H.E. Bates, A Love of Flowers My garden is my favorite teacher. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com Delve in! The year's before us; Spring's promise fills the air. Descendants of Antæus, The brown earth's touch can free us, Renew us and restore us, From the hand o' carking care. ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, "Invitation," Around the Year in the Garden, 1913 I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden. ~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666 One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides. ~W.E. Johns, The Passing Show Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. ~Douglas William Jerrold, about Australia, A Land of Plenty I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. ~John Erskine In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. ~Margaret Atwood He talked and contrived endlessly to the effect that I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of a man's attention and care.... he insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing��"and saying again and again��"that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education. ~Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound [‘He’ being Berry's father ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] Green fingers are the extension of a verdant heart. ~Russell Page The garden is a love song, a duet between a human being and Mother Nature. ~Jeff Cox It is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about gardening. You have got to love your garden whether you like it or not. ~W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, Garden Rubbish, 1936 A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. ~Charles Lamb, 1830 To this day I cannot see a bright daffodil, a proud gladiola, or a smooth eggplant without thinking of Papa. Like his plants and trees, I grew up as a part of his garden. ~Leo Buscaglia Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. ~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant. ~Author Unknown No matter where you are you can grow something to eat. Shift your thinking and you'd be surprised at the places your food can be grown! Window sill, fire escape and rooftop gardens have the same potential to provide impressive harvests as backyard gardens, greenhouses and community spaces. ~Greg Peterson, Grow Wherever You Go! Discovering the Place Where Your Garden Lives, 2009, www.urbanfarm.org When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson I know the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries. ~Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer My little bit of earth in the front garden is one of the places that I find my bearings. The rhythm of my day begins with a cup of coffee and a little bit of weeding or dreaming. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon, www.wildthymecreative.com A rainbow of soil is under our feet; red as a barn and black as peat. It's yellow as lemon and white as the snow; bluish gray. So many colors below. Hidden in darkness as thick as the night; The only rainbow that can form without light. Dig you a pit, or bore you a hole, you'll find enough colors to well rest your soil. ~Francis D. Hole (1913��"2002), "A Rainbow of Soil Words" Anybody who wants to rule the world should try to rule a garden first. ~Gardening Saying We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist. ~Wendell Berry Essential advice for the gardener: grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbor, and always make thyme for loved ones. ~Author Unknown Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart. ~Karel Čapek, The Gardener's Year, translated by M. and R. Weatherall, 1931 And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose, And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows... ~Rudyard Kipling, "The Glory of the Garden" Most people who possess anything like an acre, or half of it, contribute weekly to the support of a gentleman known as Jobbing Gardener. You are warned of the danger that he may prove to be Garden Pest no 1. ~C.E. Lucas-Phillips, The New Small Garden Plants give us oxygen for the lungs and for the soul. ~Terri Guillemets I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must not write outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849��"1924), In the Garden, published posthumously, 1925 I sit in my garden, gazing upon a beauty that cannot gaze upon itself. And I find sufficient purpose for my day. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com Can plants be happy? If they get what they need, they thrive ��" that's what I know. ~Terri Guillemets, "Lessons from Nature to the Human Heart" An acre of land between the shore and the hills... A garden I need never go beyond, Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun... ~Edward Thomas (1878��"1917), "For These" There is something primal, even sexy about growing asparagus in the garden that is lost to those who are only familiar with the canned variety. During the harvest each spring, it is with joyous anticipation that I visit the garden daily, simply for the satisfaction of finding those tender new shoots reaching up towards the sun. ~Kari Spencer, www.themicrofarmproject.com, quotation from Squidoo article “Garden Tips from The Micro Farm Project: How to Grow Asparagus” (Spears of Joy) Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it. ~S.J. Perelman, Acres and Pains, 1951 Work, through the summer golden, And through the autumn's glow, Till the months lay down their burden In the full garden's guerdon, And earth, once more enfolden, Sleeps warm beneath the snow. ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, "Invitation," Around the Year in the Garden, 1913 In almost every garden, the land is made better and so is the gardener. ~Robert Rodale (1930��"1990) We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. "It must be up there somewhere on the horizon," we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet. ~William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth Life begins the day you start a garden. ~Chinese Proverb I believe that virtually everyone has the ability to either grow some food at home, or to find an appropriate location to start a garden. I may sound like a kook who plants my landscape with cucumbers instead of carnations, peppers instead of petunias, and fruit trees rather than ficus, but I am convinced that wherever you go, you can grow food! Now is the time for us to join together and plant the seeds that will transform the places in which we live. ~Greg Peterson, Grow Wherever You Go! Discovering the Place Where Your Garden Lives, 2009, www.urbanfarm.org [Here's a great 45-minute video of Greg talking about urban farms: youtube.com/watch?v=_liYW7diA5U ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] Today I had set aside for spading. Now there is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp. You turn a spade full and then carefully knock all the lumps to pieces and you go on for hours without thinking about anything. ~John Steinbeck, letter to Kate Beswick A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often ��" just to save it from drying out completely. ~Pam Brown If there was a big gardening convention, and you got up and gave a speech in favor of fast-motion gardening, I bet you would get booed right off the stage. They're just not ready. ~Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts: All New, All Crispy How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power? How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it? Science says that an acre of soil produces one horsepower every day. But you could pour gasoline all over the ground forever and never see it sprout maple trees. ~William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error. ~Sara Stein, My Weeds, 1988 Farming is a profession of hope. ~Brian Brett It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing. ~Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts, 1981 Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com As a gardener, I'm among those who believe that much of the evidence of God's existence has been planted. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city. ~S.J. Perelman The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer God's heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth. ~Dorothy Frances Gurney, "Garden Thoughts" The home gardener is part scientist, part artist, part philosopher, part ploughman. ~John R. Whiting Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. ~Wendell Berry My rule of green thumb for mulch is to double my initial estimate of bags needed, and add three. Then I'll only be two bags short. ~Author Unknown We come from the earth. We return to the earth. And in between we garden. ~Author Unknown Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields. ~Charles Wagner With fronds like you, who needs anemones. ~Gardening Saying God loved the flowers and invented soil. Man loved the flowers and invented vases. ~Variation of a saying by Jacques Deval (God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.) The moment that a child can walk, like that in which it first can talk, is a precious start of exploration into landscapes of creation. Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking on the earth. By sense of touch the feet assess the nature of the wilderness of earth beneath; yet human speech cannot express what feet can teach. Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking on the earth. ~Francis D. Hole (1913��"2002), "Walking on the Earth" I saw all the people hustling early in the morning to go into the factories and the stores and the office buildings, to do their job, to get their checks. But ultimately, it's not office buildings or jobs that give us our checks. It's the soil. The soil is what gives us the real income that supports us all. ~Ed Begley, Jr. I doe hold it, in the Royall ordering of Gardens, there ought to be Gardens, for all the Moneths in the Yeare: In which, severally Things of Beautie, may in then in Season. ~Francis Bacon Weed it and reap. ~Gardening Saying I envision a day when every city and town has front and back yards, community gardens and growing spaces, nurtured into life by neighbors who are no longer strangers, but friends who delight in the edible rewards offered from a garden they discovered together. Imagine small strips of land between apartment buildings that have been turned into vegetable gardens, and urban orchards planted at schools and churches to grow food for our communities. The seeds of the urban farming movement already are growing within our reality. ~Greg Peterson, Grow Wherever You Go Discovering the Place Where Your Garden Lives, 2009, www.urbanfarm.org [Local to Phoenix? Take the free Urban Farm tour, info on Greg's website. ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] When God blesses the harvest, there is enough for the thief as well as the gardener. ~Polish Proverb More grows in the garden than the gardener sows. ~Spanish Proverb And for our work��"though showers And autumn frosts destroy��" Our greatest pay's not measured In fruit and flower we've treasured, But in the golden hours That brought us health and joy! ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, "Invitation," Around the Year in the Garden, 1913 History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. ~Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors Often... visible outdoor areas are homogenous, cookie-cutter spaces, where neatly-trimmed grass or a few well-placed flower pots are admired and appreciated by the neighbors. But for some revolutionary gardeners, a feast for the eyes is not enough. They want something edible in return for the hard work, the water and the expense of tending a landscape. These food revolutionaries are maximizing their cultivation area by converting their landscapes, patios, and nearby vacant lots into productive edible gardens. In the quest for more space to grow food, even conventional front lawns are being transformed into maverick, and highly visible, vegetable plots.... the rise of modern vegetable gardeners who are cutting against the grain of current landscape fashion to grow food out in the open once again. ~Kari Spencer, www.themicrofarmproject.com, quotation from Squidoo article “Ground-Breaking: Making the Switch from Lawns to Food” Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw. ~Henry David Thoreau Today I think Only with scents,��"scents dead leaves yield, And bracken, and wild carrot's seed, And the square mustard field... It is enough To smell, to crumble the dark earth... ~Edward Thomas (1878��"1917), "Digging" Learn to be an observer in all seasons. Every single day, your garden has something new and wonderful to show you. ~Author Unknown I like to jot down thoughts and ideas as I tread life's garden, for then sometimes when I am weary I can turn a leaf and find what my mood was on a certain day and that changes a train of thought and brings back sunshine. ~Helen Rose Anne Milman Crofton, My Kalendar of Country Delights, "September Nineteenth," 1903 In making out your garden plan this year you will probably find yourself handicapped by the lack of accurate knowledge about your plants of last year��"how much of each thing you used, the dates of the last frost in the spring and the first killing frost in autumn, when the various insect pests appeared, when you made your last sowing for winter vegetables, how long after planting it took the different varieties of vegetables to mature, and a score of other things, all of which you have had to guess at with no degree of certainty. Provide now against next spring. Get a cheap diary and leave it in the pocket of your work clothes or hang it up in the tool shed. In it jot down from time to time the things you particularly want to keep track of. ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, Around the Year in the Garden: A Seasonable Guide and Reminder for Work with Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers, and Under Glass, "February: First Week, Make a Plan Now��"And Follow It This Summer: Keep a Garden Diary," 1913 A gardener's best tool is the knowledge from previous seasons. And it can be recorded in a $2 notebook. ~Andy Tomolonis Bloom where you are planted. ~Author Unknown And I beseech you, forget not to informe yourselfe as dilligently as may be, in things that belong to Gardening. ~John Evelyn The Walls enriched with Fruit-trees and faced with a covering of their leafy extensions; I should rather have said hung with different pieces of Nature's noblest Tapestry. ~James Hervey Just because you've only got houseplants doesn't mean you don't have the gardening spirit ��" I look upon myself as an indoor gardener. ~Sara Moss-Wolfe Early to bed, early to rise; Work like hell and fertilize. ~Emily Whaley Flowers grow in inches, but are destroyed by feet. ~Gardening Saying When the soil disappears, the soul disappears. ~Terri Guillemets Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared. ~Jack Handey When overwhelmed and stressed and unable to think, I go out and garden, it's cheaper than a shrink. ~Author Unknown If you've never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand That soils my land, And giv'st me for my bushel sowne Twice ten for one. All this, and better, Thou dost send Me, to this end, That I should render, for my part, A thankful heart. ~Robert Herrick Gardening is a kind of disease. It infects you, you cannot escape it. When you go visiting, your eyes rove about the garden; you interrupt the serious cocktail drinking because of an irresistible impulse to get up and pull a weed. ~Lewis Gannit Man ��" despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments ��" owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. ~Author and exact wording unknown [Anyone know? I've been told this was quoted by Paul Harvey, if that helps. ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] When you have done your best for a flower, and it fails, you have some reason to be aggrieved. ~Frank Swinnerton Life's a garden ��" dig it. ~Gardening Saying The ancient Hebrew association of man with soil is echoed in the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil. This powerful metaphor suggests an early realization of a profound truth that humanity has since disregarded to its own detriment. Since the words "humility" and "humble" also derive from humus, it is rather ironic that we should have assigned our species so arrogant a name as Homo sapiens sapiens ("wise wise man"). It occurs to me, as I ponder our past and future relation to the earth, that we might consider changing our name to a more modest Homo sapiens curans, with the word curans denoting caring or caretaking, as in "curator." ("Teach us to care" was T.S. Eliot's poetic plea.) Of course, we must work to deserve the new name, even as we have not deserved the old one. ~Daniel Hillel, Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil If you are a gardener, you can always put "Plant Manager" on your résumé. ~Author Unknown I love being asked to identify plants, and I don't know which gives me more pleasure: to know what they are or not to know what they are. ~Elizabeth Lawrence (1904��"1985), "More Winter Blooms," 1969 February 23rd We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot. ~Leonardo da Vinci The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness. ~Dalai Lama I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. ~Wendell Berry Gardening gives one back a sense of proportion about everything ��" except itself. ~May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, 1968 Gardening is growing things.... You start in the front with parsley, and lettuce, and onions, and radishes.... Then comes the beets, and the carrots, and the peas, and the bunch beans. The potatoes are over in a field by themselves. Then comes the asparagus, and the celery, and last of all the pole beans, and the butter beans, and the sweet corn. Then you bound your garden on the north and the east with cantelopes and on the south and the west with watermelons. Then you plant sunflowers and hollyhocks in the back corners. Then you pray for the rain to come and if too much comes, you pray for it to stop. It keeps you busy all summer praying and hoeing. ~Virginia Cary Hudson, "Gardening," O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, 1962 It was a perfect day For sowing.... Nothing undone Remained; the early seeds All safely sown. And now, hark at the rain, Windless and light, Half a kiss, half a tear, Saying good-night. ~Edward Thomas (1878��"1917), "Sowing" Timeliness, which is of importance in achieving success in almost any undertaking, is particularly important in garden operations.... On the other hand, the gardener who imagines that his work can be reduced to a set of rules and formulæ, followed and applied according to special days marked on the calendar, is but preparing himself for a double disappointment. Few things are so certain to be uncertain as the seasons and the weather; and these, rather than a set of dates, even for a single locality, form the signs which the real gardener follows. That is the great trouble with much book and magazine gardening. ~Frederick Frye Rockwell, Around the Year in the Garden: A Seasonable Guide and Reminder for Work with Vegetables, Fruits, and Flowers, and Under Glass, "Introduction," 1913 There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. ~Alfred Austin The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. ~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the earth's hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness. ~Wallace H. Fuller, Soils of the Desert Southwest, 1975 Gardeners learn by trowel and error. ~Gardening Saying Fingers now scented with sage and rosemary, a kneeling gardener is lost in savory memories. ~Dr. SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com Whoever makes a garden Has never worked alone; the rain has always found it, The sun has always known; The wind has blown across it And helped to scatter seeds; Whoever makes a garden Has all the help he needs. ~Author Unknown Whoever makes a garden Has oh so many friends: The glory of the morning, The dew when daylight ends, And rain and wind and sunshine And dew and fertile sod, For he who makes a garden Works hand in hand with God. ~Author Unknown Laying out grounds... may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.... it is to assist Nature in moving the affections... the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature... ~William Wordsworth, letter to George Beaumont, 1805 October 17th [Author trivia: Wordsworth was brilliant at landscape gardening! ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] [T]he creation of the Landscape-Garden offered to the true Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here was, indeed, the fairest field for the display of invention, or imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel Beauty; the elements which should enter into combination being, at all times, and by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform of the tree, and in the multicolor of the flower, he recognized the most direct and the most energetic effort of Nature at physical Beauty. And in the direction or concentration of this effort, or, still more properly, in its adaption to the eyes which were to behold it upon earth, he perceived that he should be employing the best means ��" laboring to the greatest advantage ��" in the fulfilment of his destiny as Poet. ~Edgar Allan Poe, "The Landscape-Garden," 1842 ['He' being Mr. Ellison ��"tεᖇᖇ¡·g] Nothing is more completely the child of Art than a Garden. ~Walter Scott Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society. ~Alfred Austin [T]he final step in becoming an urban farmer is the naming of your farm, even if your name is simply for the few pots on your front porch. Creating your name helps to build a sense of place within your neighborhood as well as pride in your accomplishments. By naming your farm you give it a life of its own. Be creative and come up with a name that inspires and makes people smile, like my friend Laura's "Wish We Had Acres," the Fairy Tale inspired "Jack's Bean Stalk" or my "Urban Farm." ~Greg Peterson, My Ordinary Extraordinary Yard: The Story of the Urban Farm, 2009, www.urbanfarm.org An optimistic gardener is one who believes that whatever goes down must come up. ~Leslie Hall And if Mrs. Harris and myself are lucky enough to be in Heaven at the same time, I know what we can do when things get dull. We can give a garden party. I sure hope God didn't forget to plant a garden in Heaven. ~Virginia Cary Hudson, "Gardening," O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, 1962 I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery. ~Wendell Berry I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation. ~Phyllis Theroux When one of my plants dies, I die a little inside too. ~Terri Guillemets I cultivate my garden, and my garden cultivates me. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com Be it deep or shallow, red or black, sand or clay, the soil is the link between the rock core of the earth and the living things on its surface. It is the foothold for the plants we grow. Therein lies the main reason for our interest in soils. ~Roy Simonson, USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, 1957 Your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds, The harvest can be either flowers or weeds. ~Author Unknown O ye Sun and Moon, oh ye beans and roses, oh ye jigs and juleps, Bless ye the Lord, Praise Him and Magnify Him Forever. Amen. ~Virginia Cary Hudson, "Gardening," O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, 1962 One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. ~Dan Bennett A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm ��" it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. ~Joel Salatin Old gardeners never die, they just run out of thyme. ~Gardening Saying By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course. ~Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, 1981