
When I heard the line about asking for gardening tips in the movie Grow, I knew I had to carefully pull out my phone and record it in my notes app.
How could I not.
It’s so true.
And I paraphrase…
“I suppose you don’t really know someone until you ask them for gardening tips.”
Isn’t that the truth!
Ask five different people how to care for your lawn and you’ll get seven different answers.
“Fertilize frequently and often,” says the person selling a lawn service.
“Only use organic fertilizer!” says the person trying not to add more synthetic fertilizer runoff to streams and pond.
“Reduce the lawn!” says the person who thinks lawns are a waste of land.
“What lawn?” asks the person who only thinks of a lawn as “grass I need to mow.”
“Why ask me about lawns, I’m a gardener,” says the person who thinks only growing flowers and vegetables is truly gardening.
And so on.
Yes, you really do learn a lot about someone when you ask them for gardening tips.
It’s one of my new favorite gardening quotes, along with the greatest sentence ever written about gardening that I wrote about a few weeks ago.
(I need to add the movie, Grow, to the list of movies I wrote about way back in 2008.)
Thanks for reading to the end! Take good care,
Carol


I would like to get to know you better. So why do you prune back your fig trees in the fall, please, like I read in one of your earlier posts? I have a young fig tree, and I don’t prune it because it’s so small and I don’t want to discourage it. I’m in zone 6a or b, depending on where you look on the internet. If fall fig pruning is something I should be doing, I’d like to be doing it.
Hi Stephanie, The reason I cut back my fig in the fall is because it generally dies back to the ground by spring and then comes back up from the roots. You could leave yours unpruned this year and see how far back it dies. Be sure and cover over the crown with a thick layer of leaves/mulch for extra protection.