You might be a Master Gardener if....
You wear your badge 24 hours a day, every day.
Someone mentions aralia spinosa and you say "Oh yes, devil's walking stick"
The only friends you have are other Master Gardeners.
You make compost in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator.
You actually had your soil tested
You saved all the covers of the back issues from Plant Delights nursery.
Your vacation is based on which gardens and nurseries to visit.
You don't have any dress shoes, just eight pairs of garden shoes.
You've been gardening so long no one recognizes your face.
You know the green side goes up, roots go down.
Hey, these are good. I think I should get credit.

Hi Eddie! I loved your responses!

None of us are getting credit. The ad will be in the charity section of the newspaper...

I'll will be for/by "Master Gardener's".

Is it okay I still use some of yours?

Thanx... Meadow Lark

Why sure, use all of them. I thought of another:
.....If you stop and weed strangers yards

As typical for any organization there are hundreds of us here and two of us are doing all the work.

Oh, but Eddie, the rest come to all the get-togethers and make nice noises and say what a great organization it is and make the numbers look good on the record books! Doesn't that count for something? LOL

Meadow Lark, if you do a Google search for "master gardener if" you should get lots of great ones. I started to list a few of my favorites, but they all fit!

..it's not a matter of If you will get a greehouse, it's a matter of WHEN.
..your tomatoes spend as much time indoors as they do outdoors.
..your husband gives you a diamond tennis bracelet and you think to yourself "gee, for the price of this , he could have bought me a Mantis tiller"
..your wedding ring spends more time on the ledge above the sink than on your hand.
..your friends and family don't bother to call you on a nice day because they know you're in the garden.
..you know that Sevin is not a number
..you take every single person who enters yor house on a "garden tour"
..You look at your child sandbox and see a raised bed.
..You ask for tools for Christmas, Mother/Father's day and any other day just because.
..When ever you are at the store or home center, woth out even thinking, you automatically go to the yard and garden department to see what they have.

And my personal FAVORITE,
..You keep a shovel in the trunk of your car at all times...Just in case....

PS...I am not taking credit for coming up with any of the above sayings, Over time I have collected a list of cute sayings that are about gardening, that I can relate to my self.

You can't bear to thin seedlings and throw them away.
You scold total strangers who don't take care of their potted plants.
You refuse to send cut flowers to funerals...only living plants. (You also have an artificial Christmas tree.)
You know how many bags of fertilizer your car will hold.
You can amuse yourself for more than an hour with a water hose.
YouÂve been cited for reckless driving on a riding lawn mower.
You are excited over the amount of compost your worms are making.

Ya'll are great! Some of your responses have me "rolling"... LOL...

The scarey part is how many of them sound like ME!!!!

Feel free to keep it going...

Meadow Lark

PS - It's a BEAUTIFUL Spring in NE Alabama!!!!!

Your fridge has several envelopes full of home grown seeds.
You knock on the door of a total stranger and ask for a truck load of that nice manure out back.
You carry a shovel in the back of your pickup for just that occasion.
You cruse construction sites in the off chance that you might find a discarded board or two for another raised bed.
You stop at a straingers house and give them advice on installing the sprinkler system that they are having problems installing.
You cant decide between that new deck or another greenhouse.

I think it might be a disease obtained from exposure to sun and soil.

You drive around the neighborhood hoping to score extra bags of leaves for your compost pile
Your preferred reading matter is seed catalogs

You call your local Lowe's Garden Center, and tell, them that while browsing their selection of Roses, you saw some aphids crawling on them, and thought they might appreciate knowing this, so they could spray them;
You lay in your bed at night and plan the layout of your flowerbeds;
You hide your hands when you attend church, as they are so rough from gardening;

You Grow Something Besides OLD!

You leave for work with clean hands, but by the time you reach the car, your nails are grimy.

LOL!!!! I LOVE That last one! That is DEFINATELY me!!!

Meadow Lark

Your nails are usually jagged and have a line of dirt under them.
Your husband buys you a bouquet of flowers, and you think darn,now why didn't he just buy me a plant?
You spend more money on plants than clothes each month.
You'd rather spread compost than shop with your girlfriends.
You buy plants before you known where you're going to put them.
Your children are complaining of hunger because mommy is still in the garden and hasn't cooked dinner yet and the sun is going down.
You drive down the road wishing you could jump out and prune various trees you drive by.
You find yourself talking to yourself and to plants in the garden.
You assume that your neighbors think your nuts because you spend so much time in the garden.
You think about any aspect of gardening 50-75% of the day.
You think for a second that you're becoming obsessed then in the very next second you think you were nuts for thinking that in the first place.
and #1.........

IYHO the most interesting and exciting thing on the planet to you is gardening and the idea of saving, contributing to, and preserving the environment...because it is!

-besides your kids and husband of course ;)

You tell strangers about your worms.
You buy mulch by the cubic yard.
You've given up trying to explain double dug to your neighbor.
You have driven four hours to scout out a nursery that ended up not having what you wanted, but spent a hundred dollars anyway.
You have an account at your local nursery.

you know that your corvette will hold five, new grafted roses!

You sneak up to your neighbors front porch to deadhead the potted annuals.

Your daughters are taking you for a manicure for Mother's Day and you have to start working a week in advance to get your nails clean enough to go!

You leave notes on the doors of complete strangers that explain mulch should be put around a tree in a donut, not a volcano
You talk about the quantity of mulch you used this year in terms of truckloads
You get positively excited to find a new source of manure
You have more garden books than all the local libraries combined, and have a lending program with your friends
You are constantly dividing perennials to make more, when your garden is full already
Like pokemon cards, when it comes to plants you've gotta have them all
In spring you can't have guests because your guest room is full of rooting cuttings
People say your house looks like a jungle not because of the decor, but because of all the houseplants
Ever year your flowers beds grow and your lawn shrinks
If there were a "Gardener's Anonymous" group, you know you would have to go. Your family would insist.

You're at the garden center and you overhear two people (total strangers to you) discussing a plant and whether it will work in certain conditions, and you know it won't, but you hear them decide to buy it, and you just *have* to butt in...

You get that lift in your heart when the butterfies and birds hang around your garden, but you're a cold-blooded killer when you catch a slug or snail in your hostas.

You buy 11 yards of washed dairy manure when you only needed 6 because you knew you'd use it during the year or you'd share it with neighbors but now the leftovers are sitting in a huge pile in your tiny work area (all that's left by the time you finish developing every possible planting area). And you throw a protective cage over the little plant that emerged on top of the manure pile...just in case it's something great or really, just because it's alive.

You spend more money on soil and compost than you would on a vacation.

You see a suffering plant or tree at a nursery and have to save it by bringing it home to your plant hospital.

You think a Garden Web t-shirt is a high fashion item...and you want to wear it to the symphony just in case there's another gardener in the seats nearby.

You've invested more $$$$ in purchasing plants than purchasing furniture for your home

Each time you visit someones house you're more interested in viewing the landscape through the windows

You save all the seeds from your fruit (right now I have about 20 grape pits in my handbag) hey, don't laugh, I planted orange seeds which are now growing like crazy :-)

These four are all related:

(1) Whenever you wander through a nursery or garden center, a customer approaches to ask if you work there because "you look like you do".

(2) When you offer to help her even though you don't in fact work there.

(3) When you give her better advice than the people who do work there are able to.

(4) When she becomes positively ebullient about plants and gardening while you are talking.

I felt that I couldn't post what I really wanted to post unless I contributed a "You know you're a...." idea, so there you have it.

But what I really wanted to say is that I'm going to attend an MG orientation and undergo a screening next Thursday, and I've been a little apprehensive about whether I'll qualify (its said to be pretty competitive). After reading all of the posts above, I feel confident that I'll fit right in. You folks make me feel like I'm pretty dang close to being an MG already. Now I just gotta get a badge. Wish me luck, please.

cranebill

you might be a Master Gardener if...
you have a shove,rake,hoe,gloves and other garden hand tools in the back seat next to the 2 grandchildren car seats
you ask for a mantus tiller for your birthday
you ask for pruners for mothers day
you recieve bulbs from your children on mothers day :)
you recieve welcome sign with flowers and lady bugs for mothers day
you tell hubby just go to garden section and buy me any tool i dont have for any holiday
you send every Sat. working along highway in a flower bed for MDOT
you cant wait to get out of working a 10 hour shift to go work in a flower bed
all you think about while working is weeding

You used to try to find "pot" and now you are looking for "potash".

You tell the local nursery some plants are mislabeled and you correct them.
You tell the local nursery that there is some invasive weed in among their perennials.