If the engineers you are describing clearly disliked reading anything longer than a paragraph and had contempt for longer documents, then isn't it possible that they WERE using "verbiage" in accordance with your own definition? Contrary to your later comment, it seems to me that they may have been acutely aware that verbiage meant "excessive or poorly written documents."

I still take issue with the use of myself in the original sentence. In the fragment ...like myself..., the pronoun "myself" is not reflexive. In order to be reflexive, it would have to be the object after the verb in the sentence. The subject, verb, and object of the sentence are "...gardeners...use...fertilizer", respectively. Again, "myself" is the preposition's object, part of a prepositional phrase,and really should be "me". Here are some simpler, more obvious examples:

"I pat myself (on the back)..."
"I kick myself (for being such a pedant)..."
"I watch myself (in the mirror)..."

but:

"People like me (should make more money)..."

Notice, in the first three examples, they're reflexive, specifically because both the subject and the object are in the first person.

"I watch myself"

but:

"I watch you."

"You watch yourself"

but:
"you watch me."

"Gardeners" can only be reflexive with "themselves", not with "me".

"Like can only be followed by "myself" if it means "have affection for", as in:

"I like myself a lot." At the risk of beating a dead horse here, "I like you, you like me, I like myself, you like yourself, etc."

If I may ask, why the need to jam together so much into one sentence and create a punctuation nightmare? It's even slightly confusing as to whether your cousins, your teachers, and the Smiths are actually the same people. How about something more like this?

“I am indebted to my family, especially my cousins, Jane and John Smith. Jane was also my first teacher, without whom I would not be where I am today. John was my second teacher, who taught me more than he could have possibly imagined.”

A run-on sentence should be avoided if possible. You would be better off, clearer, and more correct by breaking it up into several sentences.

There are both good and bad comments above. Chris, great description of when to use "myself", but you and several others have mistakenly suggested that "myself" is the subject of the sentence. It is not. "Gardeners" is the subject. "...Like... is a preposition and "...wife and me..." are the objects of the preposition. Of course, it should be "me", not "myself" and not "I". As Douglas suggested, simply take out "my wife" and it's obvious that "...like I..." is incorrect. Also, in “I fixed the car myself,” myself is not superfluous. It doesn't mean the same thing as simply "I fixed the car" at all. The latter simply states what I did. The former emphatically states who did it. E.g.:

"What did you do yesterday?"
"I fixed the car."
"Which mechanic did you use?"
"I fixed it myself."

More often than not, when you end a non-question statement with a question mark, it implies incredulity, disapproval, etc.:

"You're going out with him?"

"You ate the whole thing?"

"You did what?"

Better yet, add multiple question marks and/or a few exclamation points:

"You turned down the job??"

"You told him??!?!"

Oh that's funny. My wife told me this would happen while I was posting it. Roger, I meant the Zen comment somewhat tongue in cheek, in keeping with the other comments above about Zen being the new chic, rather than its literal meaning. By the way, feng shui literally means wind and water, metaphorically, our natural surroundings, and, specifically, the art of creating harmonious surroundings in which we would flourish.

Roger, maybe it was just a typo, but I think you mean yenta, not zenta.

Ben, if you mean houses designed harmoniously rather than efficiently, then you're probably thinking of "feng shui". That's oh so very Zen.

Mister Peabody, why did you direct your last post at me? It has absolutely nothing to do with my previous post.

I would suggest that if you want to tell your student to convert a capital to lower case, you should tell him or her to caplitalize. After all, removing bones from a chicken is called boning. I suppose de-boning would be, er, putting the bones back in. So, by analogy, de-capitalizing would be converting back to capitals and capitalizing would be setting to lower case. Isn't English fun?