Also just thought of this one...

A few years ago (when I had long hair- it is now cut short) I was kneeling in the main pathway, leisurely weeding. I was turning over the large rocks bordering it to get the more stubborn roots, when all of a sudden I felt this crawling sensation. Ants! They were crawling up my arms and had got into my hair (it brushed the rocks as I bent over). ANTS IN MY HAIR!!! I ran around the garden shaking my head and beating my hair like a madwoman.

If anyone wanted to do an interpretive dance on my experience they could entitle it "Dance of the Ants". LOL.
CMK

Christin! I remember you telling me about the ants! YIKES!!
I had bought my mom many of the "I don't remember planting this" tag. Her friends loved them.

When I was planting my backyard I was in search of some very specific trees. We went to a nursery with my BIL. We had all kind of split up and when I came upon him later on he had pulled a small tree out of an aisle and said "what is this tree?! It's awesome!" I yelled. "Styrax, and IT'S MINE!" I didn't care that he was the one that found it or that he wanted it. It was going to be mine no matter what. He didn't have a garden and Styrax was on my list.
To rub salt in the wound, it wouldn't fit in the car, so the only place it could go was between HIS legs in the front seat. He had tree in his face for a 30 minute trip.
But, it looks awesome in my garden!

{{gwi:201173}}

I do have a pic of him with the tree in the car and if I can find it I'll post it.

CMK - Dance of the Ants had me scratching...

I doubt everyone would consider it humor but...

I stumbled across the winter sowing method of growing perennials from seed and set (by early spring 2010) 486 milk jugs along my house foundation. My spry 80+ year-old neighbor decided it was highly amusing and brought me a truckload of recycled milk jugs from the dump every Monday. I'd come home from work to find my small pick-up inside the garage filled with recycled jugs.

Naturally, I felt compelled to poke holes in the bottoms, fill them with potting mix, moisten it and sprinkle seeds over the surface of the soil, set in a label, close the jug with duct tape, label it and set it outside on my breezeway.

Did I expect all those seeds/jugs to germinate? Take a guess.

Did all those seeds/jugs germinate? Take another guess.

What did I find stuffed in my storm door one day that fall when I got home from work? An envelope of seeds with a scribbled note: "Please grow these for me."

-Susan, LOL. You were literally rubbing it in his face on the ride home then! Too funny. How long has it been planted there?

That is a gorgeous tree! We have one for sale at the nursery...not sure why it hasn't sold, it's beautiful.

-gardenweed, ha ha! You certainly made a believer our of your neighbor then. ;-)
CMK

gardenweed
i can relate to that when I first arrived in florida I was asking a neighbor about growing some understory palms
"complete waste of time you'll never get them to germinate and even if you do they'll die when the first frost hits "
Not being one to listen to advice I went ahead and started some seeds . When they started to grow I brought my neighbor over and proudly showed him my progress. "Thats interesting next thing you know they'll be taking over your whole yard" lol gary

Probably only funny to me.
The only vegetable I grow is Sprouting broccoli.
Beautiful plants and tasty broccoli, and blooms...beautiful.
The funny part is that after growing flowers for 20 years in one of my small garden areas, these just showed up from seed last year (8 seedlings). I didn't know what they were. Never planted broccoli, ever.
I let some go to bloom and to seed. This year I planted many in the fall. Had many seeds left over in the paper bag and when cleaning the garage recently I dumped the remainder in the mulch pile. Have tons of seedlings there.
OK, here is the funny part:
You heard the recent story that about 28% of the people in the US don't know that the earth travels around the sun, well I was over at some relatives and they laughed at me big time when I told them broccoli (the ends) are actually buds and will bloom if left in the garden. They thought I was nuts.
Guess you have to be a gardener to know what florets means.
Bob

Here is a link that might be useful: Types of broccoli

Stretching for a laugh here, but in the face of this long cold winter:

I am a part of the team that created the new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map that was released in January 2013, which was a pretty standard if not mild winter in many places. Many news stories decried the map as "you all didn't make our zone warm enough." After this brutal, record setting cold in in the Midwest and East, we are seeing many stories about how the zones are too warm because shrubs and perennials are being killed by temperatures below the zone limit for that area.

All of us team members have taken to putting up large signs in our offices that say "What part of AVERAGE low temperature don't you get?" Hardiness zones are calculated on the average of the lowest winter temperature for the number of years covered by the map--30 years for the newest map (15 for the previous 1990 map)--not the single lowest temperature ever in a zone. I know it says so on the web site in multiple places because I wrote it there.

We've been competing to see who can the most zone too cold stories by the same writers who wrote zone too warm stories last year.

Here is a link that might be useful: Newest USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

Kim,
Thanks very much for the new map.
OK, there is always someone that doesn't get it, sorry it's me :-).
I feel that there is a phase on the map that is a head scratcher :
"Average Annual Extreme Minimum Temperature".

I guess that means you took the lowest temperatures of each year and averaged them. But I guess that would be the "AVERAGE low temperature"
The average extreme minimum could mean that you took the extremes and averaged them? But then what qualifies as an extreme temperature? Maybe a chart that said, "Low temperature between 1976-2005."
I know, I know I am not smart enough to get it (but somehow I was an Industrial Engineer and worked heavily with statistics most my working life.) Guess I lost the edge when I retired 10 years ago. :-)
Anyway thanks very much for the hard work your group did on the map. We needed it. I was looking for a map like this this morning.

Bugbite,

"you took the lowest temperatures of each year and averaged them. But I guess that would be the "AVERAGE low temperature"
The average extreme minimum could mean that you took the extremes and averaged them? But then what qualifies as an extreme temperature? "

That would give you exactly the same figure and a correct one, as long as you were working on an annual basis, not across multiple months sampled per year..

You know I tried out a lot of ways of saying it to be clear. Unfortunately, the way it is said "Average Annual Extreme Minimum Temperature" is what the climatologists require as the proper way of saying taking the lowest temperatures of each year and averaged them. It is their term: Annual Extreme Minimum Temperature. But there are a bunch of places on the website were I modify the term with some version of the phrase, lowest temperature each winter and average them because to us "common gardeners" that's a clearer expression.

I think the problem is that the writers don't understand what an average is.

kimka - you had me laughing--thanks!--with your post. When it comes to weather, a lot of folks apparently get very picky about the adjectives used to describe what they're experiencing.

I do appreciate all the work that went in to the new zone map, especially since it has resolved a family conflict. My son who gardens and lives 14 miles south of me really had his nose out of joint for a lot of years that I'm Z6a while his garden is Z5b. Thanks to you & your associates, that conflict no longer exists.

Oh, I have a grizzly story for this:

I was sitting on my deck enjoying the great Spring weather one year. Not how you think, though. I had trowel in hand and was sitting on the actual deck with my legs splayed and a very large but low pot in between them, digging away in the old soil from last year to put in a new plant in the pot. Happy as a clam, right? Well, I dug in a little deeper and saw something emerge and my brain said "That's a really big spider, but it looks dead." Well, my brain was right for that small second that it took to register and I didn't immediately freak out. Unfortunately, the next second, I saw movement and then the thousands (well, it seemed like thousands at the time) of little baby spiders started pouring off of Mama spider in all directions and keep in mind where this pot was located. Didn't take my brain very long at all to assess the situation and react, I can tell you that. I flung the trowel and got the heck out of dodge faster than I thought was ever possible. Heebie-geebies don't begin to cover the feelings I had just thinking about what could have happened if the brain cells had been even a little delayed that day. Needless to say, I have adjusted my method of potting up plants ever since.

-funinthesun, OMG. I would have done the same! Spiders freak the shitake out of me! *Shudders*

Not sure if I ever told this story here before or not...happened a number of years ago: I normally keep some of my flip flops just outside the back door to slip on when going in the garden. Anyhoo, I was almost ready to put them on when I noticed this freakish fellow
{{gwi:201174}}

:-P
Ps. and that is why, to this day, I always check inside my "outdoor" shoes before putting them on. LOL.
CMK

That story of the thousands of spiders coming out of the pot, wow, not really laughing. :-) That would creep me out for quite awhile.

It reminds me of a funny story, that my family really didn't think was so funny at the time. It was the first year I grew a vegetable garden and I was so proud of having fresh broccoli out of the garden, I rinsed it off under the faucet and steamed it as usual. During dinner, someone said, what is that on my plateâ¦.it was a tiny little green worm from whatever pest likes broccoli. Ewww! A lot of animated pushing away of plates at the table along with some high pitch sounds and scrunched up faces. lol

How was I to know you had to look for worms? :-) They haven't let me forget it since.

Thanks Kim.

On to the funny stories (Funny to my wife, anyway).

I was digging up roots from a bush we removed. Stuck my hand in the sandy soil and pulled up one thick root. Looked at it and spontaneously pitched it high in the air.
It was a snake. She thought my unmanly high shriek was funny. Of course, I didn't.
Bob

Yes, not funny to me at all, but I expect hilarious for anyone who would have witnessed the "chunk and run". :)

I apologize ahead of time as I am not a "real" poster on this forum (although, I do read postings from time to time). I was just scanning the recent posts to the right of my screen and saw this post.

I hope you guys don't mind if I share something humorous that happened to me. Hopefully you guys will get a laugh out of my story.

I had two large pots of Hostas out on our patio the first year in our apartment. I remember watering them one day, looking down, and finding these large piles of "black stuff" in one of the pots. I immediately thought eww, what is that? and removed it by hand.

About a week later, I found the source of the "black stuff" (or at least to this day I still consider it the source). I was inspecting one of my Hosta's leaves only to watch an Anole fly out of the pot and run off. I don't know much about reptiles, but I think that Anole had been making a home out of my Hosta and had a designated section for his business.

I never saw the Anole again and the "black stuff" never re-appeared. I still can't wash my hands enough when I think of this story!

Planto

I keep thinking I must have more funny stories to tell, but really can't come up with any, except a couple that involved DH, that I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate if I posted it. :-)

I notice that some of our 'funny' stories are a little on the cringe worthy side, including mine. [g] So not a lot of fun going on in the garden? :-)

This post was edited by prairiemoon2 on Sat, Mar 8, 14 at 7:56

Hi
when you think about it "gardening" is making Ma Nature do what you want rather than what happens naturally.
The whole concept is humorous ?? "yeah that's gonna happen "lol gary

My funny stories tend to be visual humor.

One was brought to mind by Thyme's story. For 15 years my vehicle was a 2-seater convertible. One day while wandering through a nursery I spotted a couple of nice little dogwoods, only about 6 feet high. Rather than return home to get DH's pickup, I lowered the top of the convertible, pushed the seat back and as flat as possible, and wedged the two trees into the passenger footwell. I got some fairly interesting looks as I headed home.

My other is just my spring garden outfit which often gets laughter from visitors and passersby . . . We have ticks all spring and biting black flies all of May, so my socks are pulled up over the cuffs of my pants, I have a long sleeved shirt, and the bug net over my hat comes down far enough to keep the bugs out of my shirt collar. Pretty dorky looking.

I'm usually comfortable with wild critters, but there was this one time...

Much of the back yard at our previous house was sloped. There was a terraced path mid-slope, and I had a bluebird house attached to the fence post at about 5' high. Placement was such because it was a backup house, and I found it easier to store it there than in the garden shed.

I liked to feed the birds, but the seed did tend to attract those big, ugly rats to the back area of the yard. One day, I saw a rat run into the birdhouse. In bright daylight, no less. I went over and angrily flipped open the hinged top, thinking it would run off along the top of the fence. Well, that isn't quite what happened next.

That rat launched himself out of the birdhouse, and flew! My feet were frozen in place, but I arched my back and leaned my head and torso away from the airborne missile as it flew 12" in front of my face. My eyes were wide, but the pupils followed the movement as that rat landed 5 feet downslope--and was swallowed up by the sword ferns growing there. Yikes! There was no time to straighten up, because a few seconds later rat #2 flew out of the box in the same arc as the first one. I never screamed; the only thing that seemed to be working were my eyes and the count. Three. An involuntary shudder went down my arms about that time, but I was still firmly frozen in place. Number four allowed me to focus 15" in front of my nose as he flew out at a slightly different angle down the slope. There was a brief pause...and I smiled that miraculously none of them had landed on my body in their panic! I'd just begun to straighten when number five launch through the air..Ack!.. and soon, number six followed the first rat's route... I waited. And waited some more. Finally I straightened up and looked inside the birdhouse. Empty. WHEW!

I have no idea how so many large rats fit inside that birdhouse--or even WHY they would all be smashed inside of there. That none of them ran out, and all jumped as if shot from a mini-canon from the interior shredded what I think of as typical rat behavior. It definitely goes down as one of the freakiest things I've ever experienced; Not sure if it qualifies more as a funny story or a nightmarish one. lol

Funny stories everyone!!

-Gry_Falcon, nightmarish indeed! It sounds like a rat circus act! Instead of a clown car they had a birdhouse, lol. They might have had a human cannonball machine in there too by their launching skills.
CMK

Babs, that outfit sounds very exotic. [g] But knowing how those black fly bites hurt, I would do the same thing. I didn't realize you had to deal with them the whole month of May. May is such a lovely month, it's too bad. Do you have a screened space to eat outdoors? And does that outfit keep you bug free?

We have a van and normally don't have a problem fitting in all the garden plants and supplies we need, but like you and Thyme2, when I've been in our two seater, I've stopped at the nursery for 'just a couple of six packs' and then 'had to have' that standard Hibiscus that was just the color I was looking for. What else is a convertible for, any way? [g]

Gry, that was the craziest thing! Who would have expected rats to pop out of a birdhouse, but SIX of them, leaping out at you? I can't help thinking of phone booth contests during spring break. ;-)

I have to say that my garden seems pretty boring in comparison to all of yours but I'll take boring, thank you. lol

Yeah, the rats were bizarre. I was just so relieved none of them landed on me!