Whether you’re a seasoned vegetable gardener or a gardening newbie, it feels good to dig your hands into the earth and cultivate food for your own table. For a boost of creativity and sometimes a laugh, I’ve compiled 70 funny and inspiring vegetable gardening quotes for you to start the gardening season.
Funny Gardening Quotes
“You know you’re a gardener when you’re happy to devote three months of your life growing tomatoes to save $1.27.”— Author Unknown
“An addiction to gardening is not all bad when you consider all the other choices in life.” — Cora Lea Bell
“If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener.” — J.C. Raulston
“Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor’s motorized garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one.”— Dave Barry
“Give a man a fish he eats for a day. Teach a woman to garden, and the whole neighborhood gets zucchini” — Anonymous
“A vegetable garden, in the beginning, looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.” — Gertrude Stein
“Last night we had three small zucchini for dinner that were grown within fifty feet of our back door. I estimate they cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $371.49 each.”— Andy Rooney
“An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.”— Will Rogers
“Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.”— Doug Larson
“God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.”— Author Unknown
Quotes on Gardening Mistakes
“Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.”— S. J. Perelman
“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.” — Janet Kilburn Phillips
“My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.”— H. Fred Ale
Chinese Proverbs and Verses About Gardening
“If you would be happy for a week, take a wife; if you would be happy for a month, kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.”—Chinese Proverb
“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.” – Chinese Proverb
“Life begins the day you start a garden.”— Chinese Proverb
“Better to eat vegetables and fear no creditors, than eat duck and hide from them.”— The Talmud
“Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.”— Jeremiah 29:5, The Bible
“There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven: a time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot.”— Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, The Bible
“Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground–trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.” — Genesis 2:8-9, The Bible
Famous Authors on Gardening
“To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.”– Rudyard Kipling
“I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.”— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.”— Barbara Kingsolver
“Cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education.” — Mark Twain
“I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden.”— John Erskine
“Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.”— Marcelene Cox
“When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“All my hurts my garden spade can heal.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”— Robert Louis Stevenson.
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”— Rudyard Kipling
“What this country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”– Will Rogers
Founding Fathers and Gardening
“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.”— Thomas Jefferson
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” – Thomas Jefferson
“I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden…Under a total want of demand except for our family table, I am still devoted to the garden. But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.”– Thomas Jefferson
Gardening Quotes About Hard Work
“Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.” ― H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust.”— Gertrude Jekyll
“You have to get up and plant the seed and see if it grows, but you can’t just wait around, you have to water it and take care of it.” — Bootsy Collins
“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”— Arnold Toynbee
Gardening Quotes About Good Health
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” — May Sarton
“I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.” — David Hobson
“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.”— Hanna Rion
“You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.”— Author Unknown
“Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.” — Allan Armitage
“A vegetable garden doesn’t just feed your body. It also feeds your soul” — Doug Green
“Planting a garden is about believing in tomorrow.”— Audrey Hepburn
“Garden as though you will live forever.” — William Kent
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” — Albert Einstein
Inspirational Garden Quotes from Famous People
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” –Marcus Tullius Cicero
“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”— Mahatma Gandhi
“Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.”— Francis Bacon
“As is the garden such is the gardener. A man’s nature runs either to herbs or weeds.”— Francis Bacon
“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.”— Lewis Grizzard
“If you’ve never experienced the joy of accomplishing more than you can imagine, plant a garden.” — Robert Brault
“An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”— Henry L. Mencken
“For all things produced in a garden, whether of salads or fruits, a poor man will eat better that has one of his own, than a rich man that has none.” — J. C. Loudoun
“Growing your own food is like printing your own money” — Ron Finley
“What was paradise, but a garden full of vegetables and herbs and pleasure? Nothing there but delights.” — William Lawson
“A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”— Wendell Berry
“Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.” — Daniel Webster
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” — Margaret Atwood
“A good garden may have some weeds.” — Thomas Fuller
“Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.” — Zora Neale Hurston
“I am only good at two things, and those are: gardening and painting. ” Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule. ” — Claude Monet
“We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.” — Alfred Austin
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.” — Alfred Austin
“A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.” — Liberty Hyde Bailey
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”— Doug Larson
The Poets on Gardening
“When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners.”— William Shakespeare
“A Garden Is”
A garden is a lovely place,
Where seeds burst through the sod,
A garden is a partnership,
Between two hands and God.
A garden is a restful place,
Where gentle breezes blow. . .
A family of growing things,
Where souls can also grow.
— William Arthur Ward
“The Vegetable Garden”
The garden beckons in the newness of the morning –
Soft earth giving up the evening chill
As long sunbeams kiss the soil good morning.
Straight lines of carrots with curly tops
Dig deep into the daylight hours
Reaching down to be, at last, raised up.
Radishes and lettuce rows sway in the breath
Of foggy summer dawns leaving
Glistening dew before the sun appears.
Along the fence green pole beans scramble up
On lattice twined with tendrils
Climbing first to glimpse the garden growing.
Hummingbirds and butterflies come each day
To gaze and measure growth unseen
Just the day before.
The season ends with tall tomato plants
Filling harvest baskets with their scarlet bounty
As September bids seeds renew in sleep.
The garden beckons, no longer filled
With radish rows or carrot tops
But promises of newly planted apple trees.
— Sam Kauffman
Thank you for joining me for these 70 funny and inspiring vegetable gardening quotes. Hopefully these words of wisdom have described your own love of gardening.
Comment below and tell me what vegetable you love growing in your own garden!
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