Quotes: About general garden care

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To-day is Yesterday's Pupil.

- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1751 -
see What's Coming Up #85

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The gardens I love best are those that are still affectionately tended by the people who own them and who made them -- who planned and planted and replanned and replanted them, who dug in the dirt and moved hoses and watched the gardens change with the cycle of the seasons and over the passage of years.

- Allen Lacy, in The Inviting Garden -  
see What's Coming Up #76  

 

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

- Charles Dudley Warner, echoing Henry Beston's Herbs and the Earth -

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up until your back gets used to it.

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- Anonymous -

    Stop spending so much time figuring a

   way around the work. You could have
   been done with it by now if you'd just
   gotten to it in the first place!

- John Macunovich -
see What's Coming Up #141

FiftyYdsJuly95Soil119s.jpg WaltersMulch7977s.jpgAbove, left: Thanks, Dad, for teaching me to look beyond what seems overwhelming, to what will be later if I just get on with it. 50 yards of compost to spread in 95°F... ah well.
Above, right: After centuries of gardeners have wished it away and given it their best innovative shot, mulching is still something that needs to be done by barrowful and handful. Perennial display beds at one of the world's largest wholesale perennial growers, Walters Gardens, Zeeland, MI.

Pray for a good harvest, but continue to hoe.

- Old Saying -
see What's Coming Up #164

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   Weed
   your own garden
   first.

- Old Saying -

 

 

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 -
see Growing Concerns #761 and  What's Coming Up #163

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Plants respond far better to moderate but consistent care than they do to occasional bouts of heroic intervention.

- Martha Stewart-  
see Growing Concerns #758  

 

If you are late with your autumn work,
as I invariably am, the tulip bulbs will
not pursue you with reproachful glances.

- Christopher Lloyd -  
see What's Coming Up #14  

 

Tim was so learned that he could name a Horse in nine languages,
So ignorant, that he bought a Cow to ride on.

- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1750 -
see What's Coming Up #73