Mar 04 2012
Do You Live to Garden? I Do!
Hi! My name is Gina, and I absolutely love to garden! Every spare minute of my day is spent either looking at my garden or thinking about my garden. My husband once looked at me among my flowers and said, “Wow, you really live to garden!” and an idea (and website!) was born. Friends at work get a kick out of me complaining because the weather is nice, and I want to go “play in the dirt”! Gardening is so much a part of who I am.
I come by my love of gardening honestly, both of my parents loved gardening. My earliest childhood memories are all connected to the garden. I can remember my mom in the flower garden, she had flowers beds all over our yard. In the summer our yard always had bunches of flowers where the butterflies and hummingbirds would congregate. My dad always grew vegetables in the summer, and I would follow along behind him trying to keep up as he walked up and down the rows of corn, green beans and tomatoes. The vegetables he grew tasted so good, and while I grow the same varieties, they never seem to match the flavor his vegetables had! It makes me feel so close to my parents when I am out in my gardens. Time may remove people from our lives, but we can still keep their memory near to us by doing things that they loved.
If it has to do with gardening, I am there. I have flower gardens, vegetable gardens, herb gardens, a water garden and I have bird feeders around to attract the birds to my garden. I try to make my gardens look and feel like nature, a miniature “Garden of Eden” if you will. I feel that it is so important to stay connected to the earth, some may consider me a “flower child”, and that’s about the nicest thing that anyone could ever say of me. The flower children of the sixties were into conserving nature, and keeping their lifestyle simple. I believe in those things too. We only have one planet, we need to care for the earth and quit poisoning everything. I think about my Native American ancestors who lived here for centuries! Today there is hardly any sign that they were ever here, maybe a few mounds of earth in different places and some arrowheads. Then some of my other ancestors came over and just look at what our current civilization has accomplished in the 200 plus years that we’ve been here. We have clear cut the forests, and polluted our water to the point that we have to buy water that is fit to drink, our native trees are dying, it is like the whole ecosystem is on the blink. Does this bother any one else, the way it bothers me? I wonder…..
I may not always do right by the environment, but I try my very best to garden organically, and to just let nature do her thing. By composting my yard, garden and kitchen waste, I can use the compost to improve my soil and make all my plants grow big and healthy, and healthy plants don’t get bothered by insects and disease as much as stressed out plants. Plus since I attract birds to my yard, they help me with bug control. If you look around and study nature, everything you need is already here, provided free of charge. Nature can take care of us and heal itself, we just need to get out of the way, and quit messing things up!
Gardening to me is about staying connected to the earth, and with each other; and since I have no children of my own, there is no one for me to pass my love of gardening on to. I guess that is why I feel almost compelled to write and share what I’ve learned with others. I hope you will get some useful information from my writings and will come to a point in your life where you too can honestly say, “I live to garden!”
Loading ...
Hi Gina,
Concerning your statement: “Does this bother any one else, the way it bothers me?”, yes, I and I know others out there that see this cancer on our planet is spreading and almost feel helpless on what to do. Maybe these drastic weather changes we are having will wake some people up but maybe it won’t and what if it’s too late?
I see it a sad point that the Native Americans trusted the foreigners, that turned into colonists that eventually turned into their conquerors. I many times wonder what this country would have been like w/o Christopher Columbus and the others.
I too love to garden (organic vegetables mixed into a “landscape plan” and starting to play with aquaponics in a similar way), cook, invent, teach (homeschool two adopted 8yr olds), even trying develop a homeschool program surrounding life skills (more the “passionate idea/concept” at this point) and try to set an example for eco-responsible living. I too wish I had more time / less resistance to do these activities as life gets in the way most of the time.
Please continue to talk “dirty” and look forward to your tweets and rechecking your website from time to time.
May the Creator bless you. =];-)
Hey, this is a nice little website about gardening. I would love to feature you on our blog to help you get more exposure. If you would like to write a guest post also that would be great. check us out at: http://homeinformationguru.com.
If you are interested please use the contact form and get in touch with us. Thanks and happy blogging!
I got my love of gardening from my parents too. They spent most of their free time growing flowers, vegetables and berries. Sundays after church saw all of us out in the garden. One of my favorite memories was picking boysenberries for my bowl of cereal in the summer. Of course in Southern California you can grow anything! I don’t have that joy in west Texas however. The summers (and some of spring and fall) are sooo hot and dry. I baby the few flowers I have and grow herbs and some veggies in pots that I can move around. I’m looking forward to cooler weather so I can grow the things that do well here in the winter: lettuce, spinach, broccoli, as well as pansies, snapdragons, and primroses. I will be starting seeds very soon. I also love the birds and butterflies. We have many hummingbirds all summer and soon the migrants will be coming through as well as hundreds of monarch butterflies on their way to Mexico and South America. Winter is the only time we see robins and not every year. I am planning my wildflower and butterfly garden now, so I can get started in cooler days to come, I hope. I can’t spend as much time digging as I used to but slow and steady works. I love your site and plan to return. The butterfly video is priceless. I wish I’d had something like that when I was teaching, but then we didn’t have video.
Hi Gina,
As with you I have enjoyed gardening all my life. Now at age 70 I have suddenly had my gardening season extended to ALL YEAR even her in Minnesota thanks to the Tower Garden by Juice Plus+.
Perhaps this is something that would also interest you. You can find out more at: http://melvins.towergarden.com
I wish you the very best!
Melvin A. Niska Jr.
Hi Gina,
Nice little bio about you and your family’s garden culture. You can pass on your garden experiences by reaching out to other people and children in your community. There is nothing wrong of being a big sister or “mother nature.”
-Kurt
Hi, how lovely piece of introduction 🙂 I found this as as you’re following me on twitter. I’m all for organic gardening ! So much to learn! I hope sometime to have an allotment, to grow vegatables and also to keep active. Here in the UK people who don’t have gardens sometimes have the opportunity to get a small piece of land to grow. Allotments go back to war times, which I feel is a real positive that results from 1 very big negative. Thanks for follow me on twitter and I will look forward to learning from you!
Very best wishes
Dave