When Did You Start Gardening?

When did you start gardening?

I started gardening, in a way, two score and eight years ago, when at the age of two my mother caught me with my hands in a bag of fertilizer. Family legend has it that she cleaned me up and put me down for a nap, then called the doctor who said to wake me up to make sure I wasn’t turning blue and was still breathing.

Although my mother was a bit reluctant to do so, because you know what they say about sleeping babies, she did it, and I was fine.

I’ve been gardening ever since the fertilizer incident, graduating from digging in the dirt with an old kitchen spoon to having a trug full of digging tools at my disposal, not to mention a large assortment of hoes.

In between the fertilizer incident and now, I have many memories, good memories, of gardening with my Dad, studying horticulture at Purdue University, and eventually gardening in my own gardens.

Growing up, I always helped my Dad in early spring plant peas and onions, then later plant beans and tomatoes and other summer crops. I loved going to greenhouses and garden centers to buy roses or tomatoes, or the red geraniums my Dad always planted in a long box on the front porch.

I loved it when he would give me and my siblings our own little garden plots, probably just a few feet wide, to grow our own flowers in. I’m sure I probably lost interest as the summer wore on, but it was exciting, as I recall, to do my own planting.

And it is still exciting to do my own planting, though I don’t tend to lose interest as much as I did when I was six.

Each gardener has their own story of when they started gardening. For some, it is a childhood story like mine, for others it is a more recent event. But it doesn’t really matter when you personally started gardening; whether five minutes ago or five decades ago. You are a gardener from the very minute you figure out that you love gardening.

So when did you start gardening and become a gardener?