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Category: Vegetable gardens | Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 3:17 pm

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It seems that more and more people feel they are "entitled". I just love the "I'm more important than you, so hop to it and get me what I want" attitude.

Last night, at 8:30 on a Sunday night, a woman pulled into our driveway. When we answered the door she said, "Don't get too close, I'm sick." Okay, but this isn't a clinic.
She wanted to buy some honey to put in her tea to soothe her sore throat. This sore throat just appeared suddenly? You couldn't make it to the grocery or Walmart earlier to get medicine? When informed that we didn't have any honey, and that if we did harvest honey it would be in late June, she replied, "But my throat is sore now!" Somehow we didn't feel all that sympathetic.

Then there was the guy that kept bugging us about our garden. "I drove by and them tomatoes looked awful good. I'd take a few of those." I informed him that if he wanted tomatoes he might plant a few himself. He got huffy, and informed me that because we had so many we ought to be "neighborly" and give him some. He isn't a neighbor; he's known all over town as a moocher; and any extra tomatoes were earmarked for the food pantry. He'll be back this year wanting something out of the garden. I should have planted the veggie gardens where they couldn't be seen!

We hosted a garden tour when we lived in town. The roses were blooming their heads off, the flower beds were all tidied, and we had iced tea for visitors. I was thoroughly enjoying talking about plants with folks. One lady asked, "Will those roses last for two days?". I told her that the Esperanza was a good rose, but tended to shatter after being fully open for a day or so. Then she asked, "What rose do you have that I can cut for my son to give his prom date as a corsage?" I couldn't believe the sheer nerve! I told her that a florist in town had lovely corsages, but charged for them. Sonny might want to get a job to earn some money!

We had a neighbor in town that called and asked if she could have a head of broccoli. We had plenty of broccoli, so I said she was most welcome to a head of broccoli. I went out to the garden later and she had clean-cut every broccoli head we had. When I asked her what she did with all that broccoli I had grown, she said she shared it with her family. There wasn't a garden among them. That was when I learned you never, never let anyone into your garden unsupervised.

And then there is the little, 90-ish lady at the food pantry that follows me down the aisle, asking if I have any of that yellow squash. She loves crookneck squash. If I do have some, she wants it, and she wants it right then, out of my basket. The squash has to be weighed before it's distributed because the pantry has to keep records on community donations. She stands right there and as soon as the squash is weighed, she points to the one she wants. That's fine with me - when you are 90-ish and enthused about fresh food, that's not entitlement, that's heart-warming!




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Frank wrote on Tue Apr 26, 2016 11:53 am:

I don't know what is fostering this growing attitude in people. I have an inkling that it may be the "look at me" culture of social media. Everyone feels like a celebrity and expects to be treated as such.

Don't worry MG, you're not alone in your frustrations!

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Frank wrote on Tue Apr 26, 2016 11:55 am:

P.S MG do you write your blog entries in Word and copy/paste into the entry box? It's just that a lot of strange characters/letters appear in just your entries. I take the full blame for this as my code should be better at filtering them out.

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Netty wrote on Sun May 08, 2016 4:55 pm:

I often hear things like 'why grow a garden, you can buy all this stuff at the store?'. Those are always the first people to ask for fresh produce from my garden, and I usually remind them where the store is. We had a new neighbor once that asked if I would mind if they trimmed the trees that hung into their backyard. I offered to come over and trim it for them and asked which tree it was that was in the way. Her reply was "All of them! We have no sun in our backyard." She wanted me to cut all my trees down!

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Sjoerd wrote on Sat Oct 22, 2022 4:03 pm:

It is so good to read your postings here…like this one. It is not so common here because one would the risk of hearing: “ Mate, you can f.a.t.w.o.�!
We are liberal with language here.

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