Every gardener has some commandments that the hold dear and follow. These are my 10 commandments for frugal gardening:

1. Thou shalt have fun: If you aren’t having fun while gardening, find another hobby

2. Thou shalt save money, not spend money: If you are planting a frugal garden, the bounty you receive should ultimately save you money over the amount you put into the garden

3. Thou shalt not acquire needy plants: Nothing makes it into my garden if it has specific needs or is just constantly needy (I sat through a garden club lecture & demo once where the speaker included the word critical more than a half dozen times…nothing goes in my garden that has a word like “critical” attached to it!)

4. Thou shalt not acquire fleeting plants: Anything I plant needs to stick with me. In other words, it can’t be a fleeting, flash in the garden bed sort of annual. No spot-of-color sort of event in my garden. Plants have to come back again and again; and on their own too!

5. Thou shalt keep digging to a minimum: The less digging the better. I’m all for raised beds, container gardening and getting anyone else to do any necessary digging!

6. Thou shalt be willing to try new things: I will try anything once. I know, this is a slight contradiction to Commandment #3, but it is my garden & I reserve the right to try anything once. I can always pass it along to someone else if it doesn’t behave itself and it may turn out to be something that is perfect for my garden that I can use again and again.

7. Thou shalt not acquire thirsty plants: Besides my veggie garden area, I don’t want anything in my garden that will expire if it doesn’t get a daily drink of water. Things need to hold their own here as I don’t have a drip or irrigation system and I just don’t seem to be the kind of gardener that remembers to water everything at exactly the right time. Plants with good root systems will win out every time, over those that are more delicate.

8. Thou shalt favor plants with multiple uses: Plants that do two things, instead of just one, will win a spot in my garden every time. Shrubs that are green all year and flower sometime during the year are great, as are trees that show off early spring blossoms as well as provide shade during the summer. Plants that are interesting in my borders or cottage gardens plus provide veggies for the table are favorites and any plant that has a fragrance is a sure addition.

9. Thou shalt not hide your garden in the back corner: The older I get, the closer my gardens get to the house. When I began gardening, most of my beds were in the back forty; nice because there was lots of room and they could be interesting…or not. No one but me usually saw them. With my move to this current property, my gardens are located right outside my front door. This was initially due to not having any other ground ready to plant plus the proximity to a water faucet.

I will never do the back forty kind of gardening again. This is just way too much fun. Everyone that comes to my house, from family to the UPS driver, has some sort of comment about the gardens. And, since people are always visiting; I’m so much more interested in working to keep the gardens up to snuff!

10. Thou shalt disturb weeds often: My last commandment has to be the advice I received from a great old gardener friend: Disturb the little, almost invisible weed seeds on a regular basis (read this as daily) and there will be no need to spend hours weeding. So true. The more time I spend just cultivating the dirt in between the plants & rows, the fewer weeds I ever see, the little weed sprouts just get too discouraged to grow.

I’ve been on the search for the perfect cherry tree to plant in my front yard.  It had to be able to withstand Oklahoma weather (extreme heat and extreme cold) and it had to be able to handle the clay soil we have here.  My search lead me to Home Depot, where the fruit trees are on sale.  I saw the Yoshino Cherry and it was love at first sight.

Yoshino Cherry

The Yoshino Flowering Cherry Tree is widely used as an ornamental tree; valued for its abundance of soft, white flowers in spring.

Its Oriental branching pattern displays a pure white cloud of delicate flowers that make your landscape look like springtime on parade…

Chose this tree to –

• Border driveways
• Accent small areas in your lawn.
• Highlight outdoor living areas

These trees line the streets of Washington, DC, and along with its cousin, the Kwanzan Cherry, are the stars of the city’s Cherry Blossom Festival. Held each spring, this festival displays thousands of blooming cherry trees along the city’s walkways.

When you plant this tree, you get the same effect at your home!

Plant in a row to give you a line of breathtakingly stunning white flowers. This tree is regarded by many horticulturalist as the best flowering tree you can find.

Did you know?

– The Yoshino is a native of Japan,
– Was introduced to America in 1902.
– There is a Japanese legend that each spring a fairy maiden hovers low in the warm sky, wakening the sleeping Cherry Trees to life with her delicate breath.

info from Fast Growing Trees

Other than having a bit of a headache, a Kansas City woman was uninjured after a bullet fired at her ended up tangled in her hair weave. Police said the 20-year-old woman was in a convenience store parking lot late Wednesday when a man flagged her down and told her that her ex-boyfriend still loved her.

She replied, “Well I dont love him,” then heard gunshots. She said she looked behind the vehicle and saw her ex-boyfriend firing a handgun at her. She stomped her accelerator and fled, then turned into another parking lot and called police.

She told officers she recently had ended an eight-month relationship with the suspect.

Police arrested the ex-boyfriend and his friend in a car.

Source

Just pulled an update on the site.

Scientists have warned that growing tendency to medicate against sadness like a disease stops us embracing our miserable side and removes the motivation to mature emotionally.

Like the saying “what does not kill me, makes me stronger”, being sad and melancholic can leave sufferers better able to cope with life’s challenges, more resilient and spur them to greater achievements, it is claimed.

The researchers point out that today’s society prizes personal happiness above all else and there is little tolerance for wallowing in despair after losing a job, the break-up of a relationship or the death of a loved one.

But a growing number of mental health experts fear the increasing tendency to take a pill to beat the blues could actually affect human evolution.

Far from the disorder being a modern malaise, humans have suffered from depression for thousands of years – and it has survived partly because it is beneficial to the species in the long-term, they claim.

Estimates suggest as many as one in four people will suffer from depression at some stage in their lives – and five per cent of the population is currently living with it.

A growing number of psychiatrists are questioning whether doctors and drug companies are too keen to treat the condition with powerful and potentially harmful drugs.

Psychiatrist Professor Jerome Wakefield said: “When you find something this deeply in us biologically you presume it was selected because it had some advantage – otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. We’re fooling around with part of our biological make-up.”

Prof Wakefield, of New York University, believes human sadness helps us learn from our mistakes.

He said: “I think one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning – to make us focus on something else for a while.”

It also might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place, reports New Scientist.

The risk of sadness may deter us from being too impetuous or cavalier, especially in relationships or with other things we value.

Dr Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University, said even full-blown depression may save us from the effects of long-term stress.

He says without taking time out to reflect “you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you’re exhausted or dead.”

For more information, log on to the New Scientist website