Who Needs a Sticker?

What’s your reward for making it through another gardening season, hopefully mostly intact, with good memories of lovely flowers and ripe tomatoes?

A pat on the back?

Pat, pat, pat.

A kind word?

“You did a great job in your garden this summer, keep up the good work!”

Or maybe you would like a sheet full of stickers to earn as you go along, as your reward for all you accomplished this season?

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Harvested that first tomato? You get a tomato sticker!

Saw the first butterfly? You get a butterfly sticker!

Mowed the lawn? You get a mower sticker!

Pulled weeds for an hour? You get a weeding sticker!

And so on.

Honestly, if I was at a bookshop browsing books and there was a gardening goals and accomplishments workbook with stickers, I’d buy it. I might even buy two so I could send one to a friend. Of course, I would want it so I could easily remove a page of goals to put up on the refrigerator so I could see my progress as I added new stickers each day and week through the season.

At the end of the season, I’d be able to look back and see all I had accomplished in the garden. The sowing, planting, weeding, deadheading, trimming, harvesting, mowing, mulching, watering, and…

Whew, there’s quite a lot that gets done in a gardening season! No wonder a lot of gardeners just want to hang up their pruners this time of year and call it good in the garden!

But as we all know, fall is the time when real gardeners stand out from the rest of the world, as we continue to plant, weed, deadhead, trim, mow, harvest, mulch, water, plus plant bulbs and practice good leaf management, amongst other activities.

In fact, I think we’re going to need a whole new page to list our fall garden goals with a new set of stickers to go with it.

Yes, we are. So I made up a sample sheet of stickers, just for fun.

From left to right, top to bottom.

Raked leaves, watered when needed, deadheaded self-sowers, mowed, picked the last tomato, bought a copy of The Halloween Hare to read to a kid or just to have, mulched, picked the last cabbage, planted a tree, saw the first aster, listened to an episode of The Gardenangelists podcast, weeded, planted bulbs, planted fall pansies, put out pumpkin decor, and read Digging and Delighted for inspiration.

How many stickers do you think you’ll earn this fall?

What stickers would you add so you could earn them?

(Yes, I stuck in two book stickers just as a reminder, in case you are interested. ”Tis the season for The Halloween Hare!)

(Yes, I added in a sticker for The Gardenangelists podcast. I assume you are listening to it and that would be an easy sticker for you to earn. If you are new to podcasts and would like some instructions on how to listen to them, check out this post, How to Listen to Gardening Podcasts.)