Where did you get the gardening bug??

...from my paternal grandmother, who lived in a Texas ranch house with water from a well and a windmill! They would run low on water, so she would fill her watering can and give each plant just a "sip" she would say, when there was a drought!
She "trusted" me to help her water, so I think that made it cool very early on. She had a Southern "swept" yard, with just a path leading up to the front porch and door...all else was different areas: rose garden, succulent garden, paths everywhere. It was my "Secret Garden" type place. I wish I had pictures of it online!

Enjoyed the stories. I grew up on a farm and flowers and plants were all around me. I hate to say though when I was a kid I hated gardening. Way to much work pulling weeds, watering, and picking strawberries, green beans, peas, sweet corn and then preparing them for freezing and canning - yuck!!! We raised all of our food and either froze or canned, and our garden was huge!! But, when I moved away from home I missed having growing things around me and missed the fresh veggies. I've always had a few flowers in containers and a small flower garden but after I retired from teaching I started doing more cause I had the time. You can take a girl off the farm, but you can't take farming out of the girl!! LOL
p.s. As a kid I liked having the growing things around me and appreciated their beauty, just didn't want to be told to go out and pick two bushels of beans and then top& tail them, pull weeds on a 1+ acre garden. I would tell my parents, you want the garden, you pull the weeds (that landed a hand across my mouth and I had to do it anyway)!

Grammy,...you made me laugh with the "hand across my mouth" comment! When I think about all the switchings I got for being headstrong and "sassy"....if all our mothers had been arrested for "child abuse" like we would be today, I guess we would have been orphans, huh? :-)

Grammy, I was the same way. Couldn't stand all the work I had to do in my dad's garden. Hated the smell of my mom putting up the tomatoes for sauce.
Cat-love the part about paying you for the ladybugs. I'll have to do that with my kids.

I got the bug from various people from my childhood. My mother and father, my maternal grandmother and my neighbors, but mostly my father. He has a passion for plants that he would talk to me about. Every now and then, he'd give me a plant as a gift. In college, I'd kill the plants he'd give me and he'd just give me more. Eventually, I always kept houseplants, no matter how many times I moved during those years.

Our yard was mostly trees and shrubs, hardly any perennials, but it was beautifully composed by my father. I remember the names of every type of plant we had growing. Occasionally Dad would start a veggie garden, but it usually turned to weeds, except for the one year my sister made an effort to keep it up. The corn was great that year! We also had a mulberry tree in the center of the backyard that we'd climb, collect the berries and stick them in our breakfast cereal. Oh yeah, and we had a rhubarb patch.

My mother always kept houseplants that looked fantastic. I loved inspecting them while I was growing up.

My maternal grandmother had a backyard no bigger than 12' x 20'. She had every kind of rose blooming in there and they all smelled wonderful! She also saved the seeds from everything she ate and stuck them in a pot somewhere in the house. She talked to me about the life that was inside of each seed and that they shouldn't be wasted.

Our next door neighbor had a 30' x 50' garden. They were very progressive! They ate all organic veggies from their garden. They also grew grapes and peach trees. At that time, I was more interested in riding bikes and playing kickball with their kids. Somehow it sunk in. Maybe it was their beautiful morning glories I had to walk past every day.

Harper

nice story sofonisba..... and thanks jen for asking this question..... i pickled 22 jars of cucumbers yesterday that were picked from my garden & my dads.... felt like i needed to keep the tradition going.... and had that almost teary eyed joy when i was going through the process

first time trying them.... just hope they will be half as good as my grandpas

ok I found the gardening bug... and it's kind of pink looking... the cutest one I found!!!lol!!!

here i have a little yellow friend for your pink one!

lol... so cute!