The results don’t surprise me, really. After all, the sample set for the survey was professional and recreational gardeners who chose to join a social network set up specifically for those of the green thumb persuasion. You’d expect these folks to be a little more interested in gardening than, say, all the aggregate members of Facebook or whatever.

Garden-Share suggests the survey data shows it’s all that much more important to get kids involved with gardening early. (I suppose, as long as you’re not involving them in World Naked Gardening Day, I can totally get behind this premise.)

The Garden-Share folks provide some handy tips for how to get said kids involved outside:

• Give them kid-sized tools;
• Give them toys (or, at least, play areas) in the garden;
• Give them their very own container to plant;
• Read them books about gardening (Johnny Appleseed is on the suggestion list); or
• Tie gardening to school subjects they like (I’m not really sure how this works with toddlers, but hey…if you’ve got a fourth grader who’s all fired up about life sciences, then, well, winning!).

There are two more suggestions that appeal to the I-am-still-a-kid side of me. The first? Plant a rainbow.

No, I know. Those of you who know my cynical side are probably all like, “Um, Genie? Plant a rainbow? You have been in California WAY too long.” And to that I say this: First of all, that I could actually plan out a garden where flowers came up in an orderly fashion in rainbow-colored rows is pretty much impossible. It would take a miracle, and honestly? I’d be as aghast as any little kid if I walked out in my (currently nonexistent) garden and discovered I’d grown something that appeared to have a plan to it.

But still. I’m intrigued by the idea of setting in plants so they create a pattern. I’m the kind of person who would totally try to spell out my kid’s name with tomato plants or something like that. (I would probably fail, but damn…it’d be a delicious experiment.)

The final suggestion, and the one I like the best, is based on the premise that kids (and, come on now adults, you know you love this, too…) love playing with water. The Garden-Share folks suggest having your kid help water the garden…with their water gun.

Please stop now, and imagine the possibility. A hot summer day. Super Soakers. A bunch of kids.

Yeah, I can see how this could be disaster, too, but holy wow…FUN disaster, right?

And I’m in favor of this, as someone who, well, learned exactly how much of a fun disaster gardening can be when I lived in Iowa.

So yeah. This summer? Find yourselves some 10-and-under kids and some water guns, and on a hot dry day in a garden near you, kick off an epic battle. If a couple of zucchini plants get trampled, no matter. It’ll be a blast, and you never know…you might foster the next generation of gardeners.

• The Inadvertent Gardener wants to hear from you
• How you can help Midwestern farmers
• Time for lunch…and a little activism
• Open for business
• Submit your idea for BlogHer Food ’12 in Seattle

But something has spurred me on today to post. Because, good people of the Internet, it is time I alert you to this Very Important News:

Tomorrow, May 14, is World Naked Gardening Day.

Stop blinking at your screen—I’m not kidding in the slightest. World. Naked. Gardening. Day.

The people behind this holiday from gardening gloves and, um, gardening aprons? They’re organized. They have a website. They have an ethos.

Why garden naked? First of all, it’s fun! Second only to swimming, gardening is at the top of the list of family-friendly activities people are most ready to consider doing nude. Moreover, our culture needs to move toward a healthy sense of both body acceptance and our relation to the natural environment. Gardening naked is not only a simple joy, it reminds us—even if only for those few sunkissed minutes—that we can be honest with who we are as humans and as part of this planet.

Um, I’m going to raise my hand right now and admit to plenty of swimming in the nude. Under no circumstances did that happen as a family-friendly activity. I’m just sayin’.

And gardening nude? As a girl who has mowed over a hive of wasps before, and who DID NOT ESCAPE TROUBLING INJURY from that event (Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking happened, AND YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT.), I would prefer to keep my underwear solidly in place on when gardening. I mean, sure. Bare legs? Bare feet? Bare hands? (After all, I never did get very good at wearing my gardening gloves…) Those are all within the bounds of acceptability. I don’t think you need long sleeves to, um, trim your chives.

But World Naked Gardening Day is not a holiday I care to participate in. Sorry, members of the Body Freedom Collaborative. It might be amazing what I’ll do for a good tomato, but apparently I won’t get naked to grow one.

• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Raised Beds
• Debunking my personal plumeria myth
• Fifteen minutes
• Here is what I do not understand
• What makes a gardener?

But getting ready to attend Burning Man requires a lot of attention to detail, which meant I paid essentially zero attention to the tomatoes, and then headed out to Black Rock City without dealing with the heavy branch.

When I returned, though, the branch was fine. A little stressed, but fine. So I continued with the laissez faire approach, until a few days after I’d gotten home.

That evening, I came home from work to find the branch drooping even more precariously than usual. And of course, it was in no position to stake it.

String, I thought. I need to find some string to tie it to the stake.

I began tearing through our apartment like I was being chased, searching drawers and closets for anything resembling string. I checked my wrapping paper stash for ribbon. I considered dental floss.

And then I pulled open the drawer where I keep every extra button that has ever come with any item of clothing that I have ever bought. They’re all nicely organized in a zippered plastic bag, but do I actually ever sew buttons onto clothes? No, no I don’t. Instead, I collect them in a hidden museum of Outfits I Have Known.

But in the bag was a smaller bag with a coiled chenille thread, apparently once the backup thread for a sweater that has long gone to Goodwill. String!

And this is how my tomato plant got outfitted in chenille. Don’t ever tell me my plants can’t make a fashion statement.

• The weight of water
• This goes out to my city peeps
• Where it’s at: September 2
• Forecast calls for Tormatoes
• The password is…sturdy

I mean, sure. They’re fine if you’re Peter Rabbit and need to hide from Mr. MacGregor or whatever, but for ordinary gardeners? Really?

After all, when I looked around our kitchen, I saw plenty of vessels perfect for carrying water outside and dumping it into the dirt.

It took one trip out, though, with a pitcher filled with tap water, before I realized exactly why people get watering cans for their container gardens. Particularly container gardens on patios that don’t have hoses with sprinkler attachments. The distribution of the water without some kind of sprinkley functionality? Absolutely stupid. As I poured, I was just making holes in the dirt, thereby displacing basil and sage seeds and whatever else was there.

The day after planting, I went to Target for other reasons and came home with glowsticks (not for the garden, although they would make a nice nighttime decoration on a tomato plant) and a watering can. Those of you who are smarter than I am will agree: watering cans? They’re for more than hiding. They do, indeed, assist with proper water distribution.

In other words, I stopped putting divots in my own dirt.

• The plucky herb
• The tomatoes. I planted them.
• Water: It’s a good thing
• Starting, with seeds
• Watering results in only partial success

That was then, and this is now. Though I live in California, at the point when I moved into this apartment, I indeed did not have the requisite cast-off flip-flops available, the shoes that are still intact but not yet viable for walking around.

I realize there are plenty of people who feel that flip-flops are never viable, but come on. See above. I live in California, even if I do live in the super-temperate Bay Area. Plus, I’ve always been more of a flip-flop girl than, say, a Jimmy Choo girl.

The shoes most ready to be cast away at the time were a pair of slip-ons that I bought at Payless back in Iowa. (See? It’s like I said. And I know all you Jimmy Choo girls just threw up in your mouths a little.) Though they’re not flip-flops, they were perfect for stashing out on the patio so I could step out without tracking dirt in and out of the house, and now that I’ve mashed down the heels so they are morphing into some sort of broken-down mules, they’re even easier to slip on and off as I come and go.

Here is what else I didn’t have when I started gardening this time around: normal-sized tools. I have the world’s greatest mini-tool set, one that my friend Susan gave me as a gift, and that I love. And so I extracted its garden shovel when I got ready to plant my tomatoes because, well, it was the only little shovel I had.

It’s a good thing I needed two hands—one for the little shovel and one for the tomato plant—when I actually started planting. Otherwise? I would have had to photograph myself using the teeny tiny shovel. And that? That would have invited ridicule. I know how it is with you real gardeners out there. Size, indeed, matters.

• Last-minute additions to the to-do list
• Plants under plastic
• Breaking the ice
• Three years, one post at a time
• Soaped up

The tomatoes. I planted them.

With four seedlings, it seemed reasonable to put two in each wine barrel, but that left room for other things. I still had some lettuce seeds lying around, and some sage seeds that I brought all the way from Iowa. I had some basil seeds, and I’d picked up some random bean seeds along the way during the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour.

Seeds went in. Plant markers, not so much (I’ll get to those eventually…). But by the time the sun went down, it was official: After two years in California, I finally had a garden again.

• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Edible Kitchen Garden
• Relishing my time here
• Starting, with seeds
• Harvest preserved: The I.G. learns about root cellars
• Gardens where I’d like to live

But when I went to get the dirt for my pots, I thought maybe, just maybe, I was guesstimating it right.

I mean, it can’t even be called estimating when one is imagining the size of the wine barrels in one’s head and then eying the bags of dirt on the pallets and hoping that they’re picturing it right. I did, actually, do quite well in Math in high school and college, and given a set of measurements, I indeed know the equation to apply to the situation.

But when I dumped the first 1.5 cubic feet of dirt into the first wine barrel, it became very clear to me that I had severely overestimated. See, I had seven bags of dirt, but one bag filled more than half the barrel.

I’d like to say that I used only words suitable for children at this realization, but those of you who read me closely probably know better than that. I hope there were, indeed, no children on the other complex balconies. I do believe I used a compound phrase, a series of words that, when strung together, indicated, at the very least, my extreme displeasure at the realization that I would, indeed, have three bags of dirt left over when all was said and done.

Yes, that’s three bags. And no, I have not yet figured out what to do with them.

• Bay Area gardeners: It’s barrel time again!
• 10.5 cubic feet of dirt
• Help at the hardware store
• The demise of the hoodie
• Not ready for the spaceship

But as I stood on the BART platform in San Francisco one night with my friends Melissa and Derrick, Melissa pointed out to me that it was going to be sheerly impossible to move the planters without some ability to roll them.

“OK,” I said. “That sounds like a good idea.”

Inside, my head said, That sounds like something else I’m going to have to figure out how to do with a power tool. Hence, that is a terrible idea.

But I did like the sound of being able to move the damn barrels without requiring several chiropractor visits, and I’d already proved able to use the drill, so on to the next step. I had decided to go three to a barrel in a cockeyed triangle formation, which meant 24 bolts to place.

Luckily, the magnetized bolt setter made this easy. Right? Right. Except for the part where I put the fifth bolt up to the bolt setter attachment on the drill and promptly managed to lodge it in there at such an angle that it would not come out. The magnet held it there, wedged and ornery, and by this time in the day, the hardware store was closed. There was no option to just ditch the attachment and go buy another.

I pulled out my trusty toolbox and decided to try pliers. No luck. A wrench? Useless. Prying with a screwdriver? Pointless.

This is the point at which I channeled my inner toddler and threw a temper tantrum. I banged the bolt on the patio, though I managed to control myself enough not to slam the whole drill to the concrete.

Apparently? This is how you dislodge a stuck bolt. It popped right out on impact, and I returned to attaching casters, one at a time, until both barrels were done.

And then? Just because I could? I rolled those wine barrels around the patio a couple times before putting them in their permanent place.

Sometimes it pays to be a combination of petulant and stubborn. Sometimes, it even pays in tomatoes.

• Help at the hardware store
• Drill, baby, drill
• Instructions for barreling
• The patio garden and its stay of execution
• Seedlings, not seeds

So it should come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that, upon drilling my first hole in the bottom of a wine barrel, I created smoke. And burning odor.

I chalk this up to my own girly nature. First of all, drill bits don’t look at all like I expected them to look. I’m not sure if I just expected the guy at the Ace Hardware to hand me a giant, one-inch-diamater shank of metal or something, but the flat little jaggedy thing I brought home was not even close to what I was expecting.

I did manage to get the drill unpacked, get the drill bit attached and locked in correctly, and got the wine barrels flipped without getting a splinter. Shouldn’t I get credit for that? I mean, isn’t that enough?

No, it is not enough. Because the goal was to make holes, and I was very goal-oriented on that particular afternoon.

I set the drill to the wood, and hit the power button. Goggles? No, I did not have any. Gloves? No, I was not wearing any. But I did make a little “Eeeeeeeee!” noise under my breath as the bit started to whirl.

In a matter of seconds, I had drawn, in black, burnt carbon, a circle on the bottom of the wine barrel. I stopped the drill, which had just barely begun to smoke. It occurred to me that it might be smart to actually press down on the wood more firmly. I gritted my teeth and pushed.

Curls of wood sprang from the drill bit. Sawdust puffed into the air. And suddenly? I had a hole. A hole, I say!

I also had a drill bit that was now spinning in the hole, and the sound of the drill was echoing inside the wine barrel, and I could not figure out how to get it out.

It turns out that the easiest way to get it out is to stop the drill. I figured this all out on my own, because I’m smart like that. And then? I stood on the porch for a minute or two, holding the silent drill, and contemplating the fact that I. Had. Just. Used. A. Power. Tool.

Yes, it smoked a little. But I had more holes to make, and casters to install, and so I plunged forward, drilling my way toward the promised land of functional patio containers.

• Help at the hardware store
• Instructions for barreling
• Casters on
• Bay Area gardeners: It’s barrel time again!
• The tomatoes. I planted them.

But five things? That means I’ve learned more than one thing per year. Or something like that.

Regardless, today I’d like to invite you to step over to Heather Mak’s Five Takeaways blog, where I am featured in a post that tells you my five takeaways of gardening. Learn from me! Really! Your plants will be fine!

• A garden tour-inspired photo story
• Where it’s at: July 22
• Not a member of the society of snow lovers
• Further punishment
• The Inadvertent Gardener wants to hear from you