Gardening GlovesGardening Gloves
What do you get when you cross Mother Nature and a willingness to experiment in the garden? Dolly Sickles, our Optimistic Gardener. When she isn’t working in the non-profit sector, she can generally be found brandishing her gardening gloves.

Colloquial In Terms of the Garden

Amid fits of laughter over dinner tonight, as my husband told us about a co-worker who showed up at work with an eyebrow missing ... and no explanation ... my son complained that his iced mint tea was not as dark as mine. Meaning, yours has more flavor, mom, and mine has more ice. So my husband pointed out the window and said, "Don't you wonder why their grass is greener?" 

It took me a minute to change gears and get what he was saying, but we had to explain it to our son. That sparked a fun conversation and we had a good time coming up with other colloquial terms. Encyclopedia dot com offers the following synonyms for colloquial:  "conversational, informal, everyday, casual, familiar, chatty, idiomatic, vernacular." (The Oxford Pocket Thesaurus of Current English | Date: 2008.) 

Here are some nature- and garden-based colloquials we came up with: 

  • The grass is always greener on the other side
  • The bees knees
  • The early bird gets the worm
  • A rolling stone gathers no moss
  • The second mouse gets the cheese
  • A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
  • Corn is knee-high by the fourth of July

Have you got any to add to the list?

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Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

I LOVE the rhyme and alliteration that runs through these sayings!

Just a pea pickin' minute there!

I wouldn't take her to the garden to pick beans!

He doesn't have a row to hoe.

Here is a new term that I found:

Greenwash -- the ignoble art of misleading consumers about a product's true green worth -- is on the rise. But thanks to the work of increasingly vigilant regulators, some of the more curious and downright spurious claims are being weeded out.

How about "that really sticks in my craw" or something that worries me worries the "pea turtle snot" out of me, lol

owlady, we did talk about Hurricane Dolly, too! I hate for any destruction to happen ... but it was pretty cool to watch the headlines giving the play-by-play. One of my favorite headlines is on CNN.com this morning: "Smugglers use Dolly for cover, agents say". Whoa.

I would have thought your dinner talk was about Hurricane Dolly! I am sure you are happy it did not effect N.C. and stayed to our south!

How about nipping something in the bud, or a thorny situation?

Several things come to mind from my childhood. My daddy always used to say we were in "high cotton" when things were going really well. He also said my mother was "sweet as elderberry wine". What great memories!

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