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Confessions of Dirty Gardener

I am a very dirty gardener. Yes, I am.

Stop by my house on a Sunday afternoon and chances are I’ll be covered in dirt. I go from clean to contaminated in less than 15 minutes — dirty jeans, dirty gloves, dirty shoes with smears of dirt across my face.

Last year, I had an endless supply of old t-shirts, jeans, and gloves. I could go a whole month without doing a single load of garden laundry. I didn’t care about my garden tools or supplies. Shovels, buckets, and planters should be dirty, right?

Um, no.

This year, I am reforming my dirty ways. Here’s why:

Clean tools last longer

First, clean tools last longer. Over time, rust and dirt will dull sharp edges. As I invest more and more in my garden plants, I want to invest in the right tools for the job. Ruining a hand-me-down shovel is no big deal. Ruining an expensive all-steel nursery spade is down right stupid.

Dirty tools and gloves transmit diseases from sick plants to healthy ones. This may not be a problem in your own back yard, but when take your dirty tools to work in a friend’s yard, you increase your chances of spreading unwanted pathogens. In the summer, my community garden is ripe with powdery mildew and cabbage moths. Neither are welcome in my yard, so I’ve started hosing down my tools before I leave the community plot and throwing my gloves in the wash as soon as I get home.

And speaking of laundry, my endless supply of old jeans and t-shirts is starting to run out. I’m four months pregnant and things don’t fit as well as they used to. It’s hard to bend and weed in a tight pair of jeans with your belly hanging out. Clean gloves and tools decrease the time it takes for me to get dirty and decrease my loads of laundry.

Now I go from from clean to contaminated in about 60 minutes — a significant improvement!

QR Codes in the garden? Really?

The back of a plant tag found in my container of basil. Do you think it uses a smart phone, too?

You’ve seen them around town — on billboards for Chino Latino, at the bus stop on Medica ads, and in trendy metro magazines. Snap a pic with your smart phone, open your QR app, and you instantly have mobile access to something magical… well, sort of kinda magical if you enjoy browsing the web with your mobile device.

In Europe and Asia, QR codes are everywhere. The cool kids are using them on their business cards. With a touch of a button, you can instantly upload and save their contact information to your phone. In fact, as a freelance web designer, I just finished my first QR project — and still need to delete two dozen test codes from my phone.

As both a garden and web enthusiast, I’m always curious about where and how the natural world and the tech world meet. For Christmas, my husband bought me a Black & Decker PlantSmart (more on this in a future post). It is useful, informative, and most of all — fun.

In the garden, however, smart phones really aren’t fun. First, dirt and water have a nasty habit of destroying expensive communications devices. Second, my yard is my escape from the demands of people and technology. I will not answer your call or your text until the weeds are pulled and the compost is turned.

But would I take the time to use a QR code? Do I need to save contact information for a container of basil?

But, maybe in this case someone is smarter than me. Maybe this QR code adds some sort of value to buying this plant other than a summer full of homemade pesto or caprese…

My inner web geek needed an answer and snapped a pic. Could a QR codes make a plant tag more fun? More importantly, should plant tags be fun?

In this case, the answer was a big fat NO. The QR code had nothing to do with gardening, basil or even the company who grew tha plant. It was just a marketing ploy for DinnerSpinner Pro, a web app from allrecipies.com. To add insult to injury, the app was only for the iPhone. I use a Droid.

Bringing garden scents indoors

lilac candle

Scents of the garden

Confession: I don’t like tomatoes.

And yet, I grow them every year because I can’t get enough of the smell of those tomato plants. Nearly every day I take a moment to bury my head in the plant and just breathe. I always marvel that you don’t see shelves of tomato-scented products in the drugstore.

I figured it has something to do with certain scents just not translating to a packaged form. For example, I love the smell of fresh roses but hate anything rose-scented.

Today I browsed the candle aisle at Target, hoping for something that would bring a little spring scent into our home and came across a “tomato blossom” candle. And then a little online digging turned up this cologne, and a number of other candle options.

Ultimately, I decided to go with the “fresh lilac” candle, as it evoked a feeling that spring might just arrive one of these days. (I hope!)

What do you do to bring spring and summer scents indoors? And, are there scents that just don’t translate to an indoor scent for you and are better left in the garden?

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