Beginner Gardener

Girlfriends and Boyfriends, this is the basics. The first four are simple to find and really don't need to be expensive.
Or, maybe, you finally got your hands on your trust fund and are looking for novel ways to blow through it. In which
case there is no way you're reading this - you're on your way to some exclusive party in Nice, France at a hotel
overlooking the incredibly blue, clear water of the Mediterranean. Take me with you!!

Ok, back to my world. The gloves save your bi weekly mani from getting ruined. The trowel creates the hole in the
ground which will be home to the plant that got you started down this glorious gardening path. The shovel is for bigger
plants or multiple holes - saves your back from a date with a heating pad. And the bucket is for watering or for the left
over soil you took out of the ground. Now, if you live in the South, you will be digging up clay, as in red, rock hard clay,
not the person Clay. You will definitely need to find a place to get rid of the clay (not the person Clay, him we take a
phone number and get back to later. Gardening first, we have our priorities).

Patience and Curiosity, not necessarily in that order, are necessary. It's Curiosity that feeds the imagination (where do
you think Clay came from?) and drives you to try something just a little bit more exotic (expensive) in the garden. This is
where Patience comes in. There is a rule of thumb in gardening - the first year you plant something, it sleeps. The
second year it creeps, the third year is leaps. So, if you keep relocating your plant to a better home, it's going to take
some time before your plant makes itself at home. Kind of when you move in to a new place. It takes time to get it to look
like you live there.

Find some fun, make some memories!

What is that you say - gardening is not intuitively obvious to the most casual observer? You know, you may have something there.

I remember a garden tour a few years back. I'm standing in a small glass conservatory and this young woman standing next to me sighed and said she
had come to the tour to get some ideas, since she was a nubie gardener, but all she got was overwhelmed. Not too hard to see why - the whole place
had been staged. There were masses of pots filled with flowers that were not only in full bloom at the wrong time of year, but also required vastly
different amounts of sun and shade. (Staging is a very large part of garden tours and botanical gardens). We discussed her needs, I gave her the
names of 4 or 5 plants that do well in the shade and she carried on - a nubie gardener in the making.

So how do you get started?