NationStates Jolt Archive

EDIT: I realized that the rest of the world calls these people landscapers. So for the sake of this first post, consider gardeners = landscapers. I seem to have confused a lot of people and sent this topic way off course.

Living in a suburban house in Southern California, all the gardeners here are Hispanics. Though I'd assume it wouldn't be the same out there in the other 50 states, or at least the states that don't border Mexico.

And what of Canada? Do they have gardners for their igloos? (:D, Only kidding...)

And what of the UK? What OF the UK at all? :confused:

So, answer the poll and discuss.

(And I've NEVER EVER seen a gardener that wasn't brown-skinned. Even when I went to Lusaka, Zambia, all the gardeners were black. And I never really got the chance to see anything suburban in New York state.)

You wait for the poll, *****.

Yeah, lol. I'm in the 'burbs of north jersey and all the landscapers here are mexicans.

I don't have a gardener. But if I had one, it would be Sam Gamgee though :D

Yeah, lol. I'm in the 'burbs of north jersey and all the landscapers here are mexicans.
Woah, even that far northeast? Damn...!

And what of Canada? Do they have gardners for their igloos? (:D, Only kidding...)


Ummmm....we tend to do our own gardening. And if there are people hired to do gardening for private homes, or for municipalities, generally they are the same colour as the majority of the people in that area. But I don't have any perception of gardeners here as being comprised of mostly minorities. To restate...we like to garden (most of us anyway)...ourselves...

I live just south of D.C., and while I "garden" for my own home, the neighbors who hire private companies have people come out and do it for them. These companies usually consist of a group composed of a bilingual manager and a host of hispanic monolingual workers. However, this is rather recent. It wasn't like this 15 years ago when I lived in Richmond, Virginia.

You know, in all my years here in Japan, I don't believe I've ever seen a professional gardener at a private residence. People seem to do their own gardening.

I've noticed a fair number of tree trimmers around the neighborhood and gardeners at parks, public gardens, temples, etc.; and they've always been Asian.

Gardeners/Gardens are a tool of the illumini and "THE MAN" for keeping us proletarians down.

Down with the Facist gardens!!

i haer the british are quite fond of "uphill gardening" whatever that means.

I do my own gardening, thanks. But then again, I'm a Unitarian, a Socialist, and a Canadian.

In my books, gardeners are for rich folk with no ties to the land.

I do my own gardening, thanks. But then again, I'm a Unitarian, a Socialist, and a Canadian.

In my books, gardeners are for rich folk with no ties to the land.

well yeah, if your not rich, you have ties to the land and you're trying to make money or a living from it, its called farming.

i haer the british are quite fond of "uphill gardening" whatever that means.
I'm English and I'll be honest with you - I don't know what uphill gardening is. :eek: On another note, not many people around me have gardeners, they tend to do it themselves. However, my gardening skills comprise of moving the lawn, cutting trees down that threaten the house, putting some weed'n'feed down twice a year and letting nature do the borders :p

I'm English and I'll be honest with you - I don't know what uphill gardening is. :eek: On another note, not many people around me have gardeners, they tend to do it themselves. However, my gardening skills comprise of moving the lawn, cutting trees down that threaten the house, putting some weed'n'feed down twice a year and letting nature do the borders :p
i heard it was a euphemism for gay sex... but it was a nazi told me... well called me one then explained what he had just called me.

well yeah, if your not rich, you have ties to the land and you're trying to make money or a living from it, its called farming.
Which would've been really funny if I was trying to make a living from it, Ernst - but no, I'm just trying to make dinner. Don't forget, I mentioned I'm Canadian. Free Trade and NAFTA preclude me from making money.

I do my own gardening, thanks. But then again, I'm a Unitarian, a Socialist, and a Canadian.

In my books, gardeners are for rich folk with no ties to the land.
It's a pity because it's not true. Especially here in California.

Well, relative to the rich in America, us in the middle-class aren't rich at all. We make enough to get priveleges but not enough to kick our feet back and relax.

i heard it was a euphemism for gay sex... but it was a nazi told me... well called me one then explained what he had just called me.
To be fair, I could be called an uphill gardener sans euphemism - my garden is on a slant :p

well yeah, if your not rich, you have ties to the land and you're trying to make money or a living from it, its called farming.
Not when you have less than half an acre it isn't. Call THAT a farm and watch the real farmers laugh themselves into a coma!

It's a pity because it's not true. Especially here in California.

Well, relative to the rich in America, us in the middle-class aren't rich at all. We make enough to get priveleges but not enough to kick our feet back and relax.
ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

It's a pity because it's not true. Especially here in California.

Well, relative to the rich in America, us in the middle-class aren't rich at all. We make enough to get priveleges but not enough to kick our feet back and relax.
Enough to pay someone else to do your work for you though...and clearly, if you pay someone to do your gardening, it's not something you enjoy, suggesting you have little tie to the land. Right?

It's a mix in Colorado between white and hispanic from what I've seen....

The state is, I believe, 73% white by the last census with the hispanic population being the biggest minority... The town I grew up in is 80% white and generally very affuent... But it's not the norm for people to have gardeners... The ones I've seen around town are not all hispanic...

However when you look in the kitchens of all the restaurants in town... that's a slightly more disperportiant story...

I get my gardener, my butler, my chauffeur, housekeeper, masseuse, chef, pool boy, groundskeeper, sommelier, personal trainer, personal stylist, and drug dealer confused. Isn't it so hard to find good help these days?

I AM a gardener! :eek:

Enough to pay someone else to do your work for you though...and clearly, if you pay someone to do your gardening, it's not something you enjoy, suggesting you have little tie to the land. Right?
Exactement, chere. That's precisely what I'd been driving at in my original post. If you're only interested in the esthetics, you maight as well be living in a condo.

Living in a NYC apartment, "garden" is to me a window box. Unfortunately, it has been so hot that everything died... so I guess I am the gardener without a garden! :(

Living in a suburban house in Southern California, all the gardeners here are Hispanics.


I live in a suburban house in Southern California. My gardener is Portuguese. He earns a good living, enjoys his work, and quits if he doesn't like his employer. :D My family all admire him, he's really together in life.

While we're in England, our gardener is English.

I live in Ontario.. Most of the gardening I do isn't .... exactly legal so I do it all myself. No one I know has a gardener but I live in a fairly small lower-middle class town.

While we're in England, our gardener is English.
How nice for you. :rolleyes:

I'm the gardener and would only consider hiring out the job if I were physically disabled.

The gardens are doing nicely this year, too - except for the slugs right now. Hope the same is true for others. Dobbs and Sinuhue, I know you guys are into it - hope you're enjoying the fruits as much as I am.

Enough to pay someone else to do your work for you though...and clearly, if you pay someone to do your gardening, it's not something you enjoy, suggesting you have little tie to the land. Right?
I'm 15 so the garden is my parent's, not mine.

Personally I don't like gardens the least bit. I think it's a waste of time and money. But it's not my decision, is it?

It sucks because we used to have a gardener that needed a surgery and was limping around. He had some kind of box in his throat (I don't know what it was, but I think they gave it to him in surgery). Dad gave him some extra money to help the guy out and told him he didn't HAVE to work so hard. Eventually he didn't come. I guess he died. I highly doubt one could fake being that sick and pale over months. :(

He was cool, whenever I saw him he always spoke to me in Spanish and asked me how far I was coming along in Spanish. Well now I know enough to be able to speak with him a little and he's not around anymore. Damn.

Dobbs and Sinuhue, I know you guys are into it - hope you're enjoying the fruits as much as I am.
Well, I've had to move the 'compassion garden' - a few too many helicopters flying overhead for my liking - and the erm, 'compassionfruit' don't particularly like the available light (or lack of it). With luck, I'll be looking at a slightly earlier harvest than last year - they've done remarkably well - so I'll probably be bringing in the ladies the first week of September.

The strawberries were a write-off, I'm sad to say. On the other hand, the Vietnamese Coriander, the Wormwood, the Lemon Verbena, the Echinacea, Watercress, and the myriad Mint plants continue to flourish.

I'm allowing the Gazanias to go to seed so I can hopefully sprout some of the fancier strains for next year, and I was just about to check on the Sweetgrass. It was kinda ratty when my friend dropped it off for our garden, but it's been slowly improving.

The biggest and best surprise of the year came from the Savoury (it's everywhere, growing in any available nook or cranny), and the yellow Monkeyflower I tried in a fairly sulky part of the garden. Oh, the ornamental peppers I grew have turned out both very hot and quite edible, so I won't be needing to buy jalapenos for a while.

How'd your gardens turn out, Sabbatis?

you really have a garderner rather than a landscaper? how much land do you have to have in oder to justify hiring someone to plant some flowers and then come back often enough to tend them? how much MONEY do you have to have?? i cant imagine hiring someone to tend my roses.

whats up with that?

Wait... there's an industry of people that will do your gardening for you?

Damn... world's even crazier than I thought...

you really have a garderner rather than a landscaper? how much land do you have to have in oder to justify hiring someone to plant some flowers and then come back often enough to tend them? how much MONEY do you have to have?? i cant imagine hiring someone to tend my roses.

whats up with that?
Er, yeah it's kinda a landscaper. Not really a gardener. But we call them gardeners here.

Er, yeah it's kinda a landscaper. Not really a gardener. But we call them gardeners here.
oh that makes better sense. i was imagining one of those english estates where some guy spends all day every day tending the formal gardens.

landscaping is easy for an ambitious man to get into without a lot of money. that makes it very attractive to hispanic immigrants who want to make something of themselves but dont have the formal education to do so. it also lends itself to cash transactions where "undocumented aliens" can be paid under the table.

i saw on TV recently where expert landscapers are making really good money now. what with the increased income of 2-professional-couple families, big yards of the mcmansion craze, and the lack of time to keep the yards up, the landscapers are in incredible demand.

Dobbs -

Haha! I love your term "compassionfruit", hope the harvest is sufficient - you at least had the opportunity to enjoy the company of the 'girls'. Bummer about someone looking over your shoulder. Your whole garden sounds very nice. Every year is different, always some success and some challenges. Takes a long time to get things right, and I don't expect I ever will since we're always experimenting.

Flower gardens, mostly perennials, are still producing as intended. We have them staggered in bloom times so there's always something going in quantity. A quick squint outside shows heliopsis, dahlias, sunflowers, scarlet runners and morning glories climbing up the garage, hollyhocks, sweet peas, and some things of my wife's I have no clue about.

Vegetable garden has been producing well considering I wasn't able to plant nor tend it - had foot surgery and been on my ass all summer. Old saying, "the footsteps of the gardener are the best fertilizer", so the garden suffers in ways only I can see. Still, had wonderful weather and the hard-to-grow crops, the tomatoes and peppers, are coming on. All the food crops have been yielding as expected, it's a lovely treat to get the fresh peas, new potatoes, all manner of sweet and delectable food. We'll have an adequate harvest for storage too.

If you haven't done so, may I recommend planting scarlet runner beans on poles or strings? They climb about 12 feet, have pretty red (okay, scarlet) flowers and produce a heavy yield of string beans. I hang baling twine off an old gargage, say about 8" apart, and they climb up quickly and look like a green curtain. Bees and hummingbirds like them.

Since I take care of what little gardening my balcony allows - my gardener/landscaper is a white German student :D

Interseting idea - I'd picked up some Bee Balm in the hopes of attracting some Hummingbirds, but it's yet to flower, and at this late date I have my doubts it will.

Ironically, the cottage I just returned from (one week in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec) had a Hummingbird nest in a nearby birch tree.

Of course, any cottage holiday I go on isn't complete without a few hours of backbreaking labour worked in somehow, so I used some pruning shears to weed the maple saplings out of the Lily garden, dug a new diversionary trench to prevent soil erosion downslope (this patch of land is on the Precambrian Shield, so that sorta thing gets tricky), discovered that unbeknownst to me we have blueberry bushes coming up just about everywhere, and also found a plethora of St. John's Wort up along the road access.

Hey, it isn't fun 'til you've picked up a deep tan doing yardwork (I don't burn).

In Aus very few people have a gardener. Most people do their own gardening, it's a very popular passtime.

i heard it was a euphemism for gay sex... but it was a nazi told me... well called me one then explained what he had just called me.

Yup, tis indeed a euphemism for a gay man. Why? I don't know, but I always wondered if it had something to do with pushing wheelbarrows uphill...

I live in a fucking hovel, but my back yard is one of my joys. I currently have potatoes, raspberries, lobelia, marigolds, avocados, mint, various assorted ferns, snapdragons, a sunflower, a tree of unknown nature and various other wildflowers growing in its tiny little space. It brightens up my urban squalor considerably.

I love gardening too: it's very manly. Outside, it's cabbages, carrots, potatoes, and also some pansies and sweet peas. Inside, I have some cacti, and also a nice new salvia divinorum plant which should be most fun. And no, we don't have a gardener: but we're white, if that helps.

You guys above, growing potatoes - they're one of my favorites, too. The return on investment is incredible, I get between ten and fifteen pounds of potatoes for each pound I plant.

There are hundreds of varieties available, all manner of shapes and sizes. And for the goumet, they are quite different in flavor. Green Mountain is my favorite heirloom potato, an excellent table potato and superb baker - the best.

For those who don't have much space or tilled garden, you can cover the seed piece with hay or leaves, just lift it off to harvest.

The Salvia Divinorum is recovering nicely, I'm pleased to report. It's become a bit of a water hog, and wasn't getting any while we were away this last week. And the Nasturshiums shook off an aphid infestation and is rebounding. The Dill is looming large. And finally, the Mustard we tried growing is producing seed pods. I think we'll be re-planting Mustard next year!

The Salvia Divinorum is recovering nicely, I'm pleased to report. It's become a bit of a water hog, and wasn't getting any while we were away this last week. And the Nasturshiums shook off an aphid infestation and is rebounding. The Dill is looming large. And finally, the Mustard we tried growing is producing seed pods. I think we'll be re-planting Mustard next year!

Have you made mustard before? I've had good success in a blender. If you don't have enough seed for a batch you can usually pick some up at a health food store to stretch it out. Be warned, you can make it too hot if you're not careful.

Not when you have less than half an acre it isn't. Call THAT a farm and watch the real farmers laugh themselves into a coma!
well maybe in the vast semiarctic wastes of cannuckistan, but before the famine in ireland the average substistance farmer only farmed a few acres... i bet with modern intensive farming techniques you could subsistance or even cash farm on 1/2 acre if you picked your crops and crop placement and rotation very carefully.

If I had a garden, I'd tend it myself. That's the enjoyment of gardening.. I thought. And ofcourse the harvest.

well maybe in the vast semiarctic wastes of cannuckistan, but before the famine in ireland the average substistance farmer only farmed a few acres... i bet with modern intensive farming techniques you could subsistance or even cash farm on 1/2 acre if you picked your crops and crop placement and rotation very carefully.

I grew potatoes on a small-scale commercial basis. An acre of ground will produce, in my area, nearly 30,000 pounds. That's using modern agricultural practices, the Irish would have gotten maybe half that.

Depending on your appetite, an acre provides a lot of potatoes. Storage becomes a limiting factor, can only store until spring.

Does looking at a girl's ass who is picking up sticks count as having a gardener?