8 Ways Gardeners Prove They’re Tough

   Gardeners tend to be durable people. We have to be.

   Growing a decent tomato or pretty posy requires coping with a host of challenges and adversities.

   Here are eight ways gardeners prove they’re not wimps:

   1.) Deer and groundhogs. These two can ruin a planting overnight, destroying months of diligence without warning or mercy.

   Real gardeners don’t give up when that kind of monumental disappointment happens (sometimes repeatedly). They just get more determined.

   2.) Erratic weather. Pennsylvania weather is always too something – too hot, too dry, too wet, too cold, too windy. And it’s erratic and often extreme, creating a steady stream of plant threats.

   Gardeners learn to roll with the punches, to replant when necessary, and to cope by constantly whining about the weather (which is the one thing all gardeners have in common).

   3.) Weather tolerance. Most people have the good sense to go inside when it rains or when temperatures dip below freezing. Gardeners tough out almost anything when there’s mulch to put down or a few more perennials to get in the ground.

   Besides, it we waited for good-weather days, we’d be waiting forever. Those days happen only when there’s already other obligations inside. (See my list of 10 Murphy’s Laws that Apply to Gardening.)

   4.) Herculean backs. Speaking of mulch, spreading 10 or 12 cubic yards of the stuff (as many gardeners do on a May weekend) would be classified as cruel punishment if prisoners were made to do it.

   Yet gardeners endure, even when rain always happens right after the mulch is delivered to make it even heavier (again, refer to 10 Murphy’s Laws that Apply to Gardening).

   Gardeners also tax their backs with hundreds of bend-overs a day, hours of hoeing, and often ill-advised reaches to snip that last long branch way up there. Heaven help us if back pain threatens.

   5.) Pain tolerance. Besides overlooking or working through assorted postural pains, gardeners are always poking themselves with thorns, getting splinters from the raised beds, and cutting themselves with wire, sharp rocks, and occasionally the pruners.

   Gardeners just say, “Ouch!” (or something more colorful), apply another bandage, and keep going. This is why my doctor always suggested that I get tetanus shots every five years instead of every 10 as for normal people.

   6.) Black flies. People who garden well away from creeks have no idea what the hubbub is about “gnats.” But these face-swarming super-annoyances are getting bad enough again due to lagging spray-funding that they make any outdoor activity feel like an assault.

Read more on how black flies can make gardening life miserable.

   Again, gardeners persevere. And with the help of punk sticks, Deet, and Vicks VapoRub, we prune on.

   7.) Failure tolerance. Gardeners tend to be some of the most optimistic, hopeful people on the planet. Who else can watch their tomatoes get eaten by deer, browned by blight, and short-circuited by extreme heat for 10 straight years, yet fully expect a bountiful crop come planting time of year 11?

   The whole act of planting in itself is a leap of faith.

   8.) Yuck tolerance. Some people can’t stand dirty hands. Some faint at the sight of a worm. Some run from bugs. But gardeners tend to take nature in stride in all of its forms – warts and all.

   To a gardener, well rotted horse manure is black gold, orange slime mold is a colorful curiosity, and a snake means free help on the vole battlefront.