You pull wet jeans from the washer and find pods of seeds laying on the bottom of the machine. (and others think dollar bills are exciting)

Than you turn the Purple Hyacinth pod over and over and briefly wonder if they'll still germinate!

A little hummerless humor to while away the winter months....

Pam NJ 6B

you have a better variety of plants and seeds than your local garden center

Penny
Niagara Falls, NY
USDA zone 6a/6b
Heat zone 4
Sunset zone 39

...when you're out with a wheelbarrow, shovel & flashlight on a VERY frosty & foggy night at 1AM..."rescuing" a pink dogwood that will soon be bulldozed, but you're not supposed to trespass on gov't. land to get it.

Patrick
USDA Zone 8b
Heat Zone 3
Sunset Zone 5
SeaTac, WA...one cool place

Patrick,

I can see you now, Miners Helmet with flashlight turned on, crawling through the icy terrain with hand shovel and burlap bag in hand on your midnight mission. Evading federal police because that Dogwood needs a new safer home (and the hummers might just nest in it). You should get an ecology accommodation!

Pam NJ 6B

Hello Pam,

Awesome thread!...and great responses too!!
Hmmmmm...lets see...

When you rearrange your kitchen to accommodate several tropical plants in order to save money on not having to turn on grow lights or space heaters before sowing time. Between them and the 3-5 gallon drums of seeds/peanuts/birding supplies in our small kitchen, I'm ready to bulldoze a wall out...


Susan Louise
from Branford CT/ live in Lincoln NE
Zone 5

Oh Patrick, that's an image I won't soon forget! Pam, I almost ate some seeds last week....

Reading about Patrick freezing his tush off made me remember one of my less sane gardening moments. I think this picture tells the story.




Lizette, New Orleans, La.
USDA Zone 9

Patrick
That is way too priceless a picture! If I had been in the area I would have been digging right along with you

Penny
Niagara Falls, NY
USDA zone 6a/6b
Heat zone 4
Sunset zone 39

Pam,

Great thread to start during the hummerless time of the year.

When you make cuttings of every salvia branch that breaks off and make expansion plans for your garden to accomodate them.

Suchie

When you string old fashioned big Christmas lights in the peach trees because of a late frost, and your neighbors start to worry about you.

Gayla
Jackson, Mississippi
Canon XSi and S3 IS
Zone 7b; Heat Zone 9 (Ugh)

Lizette,

"A picture says a thousand words" and yours truely does!! Certifiable!! But honestly I'm right there with you.

Pam NJ 6B

when you sleep on the couch cause you sacrificed your bedroom to store and overwinter plants and cuttings for the winter.

Steve,

Please tell me you exaggerating or its going to be a long hard winter for you, oh my aching back!!

Pam NJ 6B

When you don't run screaming at the top of your lungs because a snake comes slithering into the raised bed you are working on.

Ever since I was little I have been afraid of snakes. I could not bring myself to touch a page in a book if a picture of a snake was on that page. I just knew that snake would come out of that picture and bite me.

Last spring I was redoing/enlarging a raised bed, and because of the wet weather I was about a month behind schedule. One afternoon when I picked up the hose to move it, a snake laying against the hose made itself known. It was about 18" long and was within 3' of where I was working. Did I mention I was behind schedule? Way behind, and I finally had a nice, sunny, warm day to get a lot of work done. I stood my ground, I had potted plants waiting in line that needed to get planted back in the ground, plus all the new plants I had been accumulating for this bed. I examined the markings on the snake and the shape of its head. Non-poisonious. Keeping my 3-foot distance, I urged the reptile to move on. The snake did a U-turn, moved around a tree, up over the newly installed stone border, right through the amended soil I was preparing to plant in, through the planks of the fence and into my neighbors yard. Back to work I went, mentally patting myself on the back for being a brave girl...with a lot glances at the fence line to be sure the snake didn't slither back my way. Of course, being a good neighbor, I told my friend about seeing a snake in her yard.

Pam

Actually my couch sleeps quite well no backache. Ok, Ok so I exaggerated a little. But I had a little fun.

Steve
Martinsville, In
Heat zone 6
Sunset zone 35

You chainsaw the eight-foot mountain laurels in front of the living room window down to stubs so that they will come back as well-behaved, domesticated, low maintenance, conventional suburban meatballs that will not complicate your life over much...

And all of a sudden there is this lovely protected expanse of raised bed with thirty years of leaf mulch that never dries even in droughts, and it starts talking to you. It says "Illicium, hakone grass, hosta, maidenhair fern, mourning widow geranium, native pink azalea, asarum, cyclamen, heuchera, cinnamon fern..." It is a very talkative, persuasive piece of earth. It says, "I'll be deer-proof, baby." (It wants hosta.) It says, "You could make some concrete tetrapanax leaves too, for birdbaths on the stumps...you know you want to..."

Then when you go to Home Depot to get the concrete so you can cast the leaves before a frost, there are some particularly graceful nandinas at 50% off, and they start talking too...

And you think maybe those mountain laurels won't ever be coming back.


Lisa
Central NJ/ z6b
Heat zone 5/6

When you treat brushing 3 or more cockroaches off your legs, arms or neck while working the in the yard the same as swatting gnats.

My yard is an excellent study on cockroaches. The ones that routinely wind up on me are the Surinam roaches. They're smaller than most at around 1/4 to 3/4 of an inch but two or three times the width of a German roach and very dark. They are found in decaying wood like mulch. Since over half my yard is mulch from the 4 trees we've had to cut down, it's perfect for Surinam cockroaches.

Also common are the American (Palmetto Bug), Brown, and Smokybrown Cockroaches. the most interesting ones are the light green, almost white, Cuban Cockroaches (Green Banana Cockroaches). We get some of the smaller ones as well, like German, Asian, and Brown-banded.

I researched cockraoches before creating this post so now I'll have to look a little closer now to find out how many different ones we actually have here.

Steve Backes
Valrico, FL (east of Tampa)
http://mysite.verizon.net/resu64md/yardhummers/
http://floridahummingbirds.net/
http://floridahummingbirds.proboards.com/

Steve
you have just squelched any thoughts I may have had of moving to Fl. LOL!

Penny
Niagara Falls, NY
USDA zone 6a/6b
Heat zone 4
Sunset zone 39

Lisa, you aren't the only one to hear the voice of the garden. The Yvonne's Salvia has been muttering for months about next seasons's plans, advocating a trip to a bed along the driveway, lobbying for more space. Nicotiana mutabilis says, look at me, look at me, use me like a Baby's Breath, I can go everywhere. And I say yes, you along with that out of control Brazilian Verbena, don't be so pushy. The gardener and the garden are parent and child: neither one knows which is which. I saw an interview recently with a native Australian. He summed it up like this: "I don't own this place, it owns me". Too bad it is dark out there, I need to have a conversation with the Pulmonaria about division, I promised I would.

...when you have a fingernail brush under every sink in the house (and even under the sink at school) because you just can't keep your hands out of the dirt EVER!

Carol WNY
Amherst, NY
Zone 5

Steve: ew ew ew ew ew Like Penny, Florida has just untempted me.

We had palmetto bugs in SC but they didn't crawl up your legs! I'll stick with deer ticks and Lyme disease.



Lisa
Central NJ/ z6b
Heat zone 5/6

Hey Ward, since when has a little darkness kept a gardener nut out of his yard?

Lizette, New Orleans, La.
USDA Zone 9

Oh Lizette - yours does take the cake and proof of the pictures tells all! I remember when you first posted that - are you asleep under that white cloth?



Carol
Milford, CT
Zone 6