As a young teen I remember Kmart offering black & white folders with Jerry's suggestions as they used him as a spokes person for their Lawn & Garden dept. I've used many of his concoctions and in my Opinion his ideas were good for those times. The eighties and on. Organic as we have it today wasn't that common except for those who subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine and followed those suggestions they published. I use the Public Library collection of Gardening Books and can tell you that there are several well worn Jerry Baker Books in the collections. His distractors can say what they will about him being a quack and not ligit, but I'll speak for what his attempt to show beginner gardeners and fruit orchard growers that they could do with common chemicals for pennies. My Grand Mother used to read her women's magazines when I was a little kid and get similar tips for using common soda in water to "sweeten" soil, (adjust the PH) or using left over Alum disolved in water from the canning season to acidify the soil of the house plants. Before Baker I was buying so much stuff from Chevron/Ortho, and Rapid Gro, Virgo, and other such chemical fertilizer or insecticide vendors. Then again, I don't walk around my place with a badge on my shirt that states that I'm a "Master Gardener". I just don't take this stuff that seriously. In my orchard of 30 trees I've been buying "beneficial incects" which prey on pest insects. Lacewings, Trichogramma wasp, Lady Bugs, Praying Mantis, etc. I have bat boxes in the maple trees & Purple Martin boxes to keep those beneficial birds around my place so I don't have to use a fogger or any more chemicals than necessary. But thinking this way all goes back to my having read Jerry Baker's stuff.

Hi Kath, Congrats on getting your nursing degree! I'm sure you worked VERY hard for it! Use the DOLLAR STORES, esp. for laundry/cleaning items, Deoderant, toothpaste, misc. cutlery, glassware, plastic storage containers, etc. Get that crockpot out and use it! I work 2 jobs and I am so thankful for my crockpot! Plan ahead for meals, especially with you working. Get a FOODSAVER and make ahead meals and freeze them. Get the mixed salads at the lower cost grocery stores, roast some chicken...you've got dinner for that evening and a meal to take to work the next day! Take your own lunch and snacks to work. Refill water bottles. Buy a filter for the sink or a filtered water container. $10 at Walgreen. $5 to renew the filter every 3 months. Drink more water instead of fruity drinks or soda. You'll be surprised how you will get used to in and REALLY only WANT water. Buy secondhand clothing for yourself and your kids. CONSIGN any good clothes you need to get rid of, shoes, purses, belts. Our local Goodwill stocks underwear by HANES...'seconds' I guess. They sell for 80 cents apiece. Sell your nursing books you don't want to keep on the Internet (amazing.com half.com) Good Luck!

Hi again folks, When I worked as a personal financial advisor, I talked to clients about "financial freedom" adding to one's peace of mind (in addition to providing the worthwhile liquidity that some envy in others but lack it themselves). The person who is deep in debt, owes on credit cards, and worries when the phone rings as to which creditor is calling, this time ... does not know the peace of mind that comes with financial freedom. The homeless person doesn't, either. When a person has come beyond the age of retirement and lacks enough money to pay for all of needed medications, food, housing and the fuel to keep it comfortable in winter ... which is getting more difficult as some of the basics of life have recent substantial increases in price ... that person lacks the luxury of financial freedom, also. But I also said that I wanted people to boss their money, not having their money bossing them. The people who have adequate resources but squeeze the buffalo on a nickel till it bellers ... aren't making best use of their financial freedom, either. To my mind the rich old guy in the restaurant who made a fuss about refusing to pay because one item on the buffet was lacking was, to my mind, just being boorish. Though I lived on pretty thin income for a number of years during my career, now that I'm near age 80 and don't have to worry about paying for some (of the rather few) things that I want, or about leaving my executors so strapped with regard to my estate that they have to go fishing for extra money to pay for my burial ... that level of financial freedom pleases me. Plus I have some to help pay for my extra care before death, if necessary. If I'm at a party where it's to go on for several hours and they're using styrofoam cups ... for juice now, possibly for water later (and I eschew bottled water, at home) and perhaps for coffee, eventually ... ... I've been known to use my own pen, or hunt up one of theirs, to put my name on my cup in order to use it throughout the period. Not so much for frugal/tight reasons, as for reusing things - reducing our wasteful use of scarce resources, plus making less garbage (and that was true long before I lived within a couple of miles of what used to be a local garbage dump [pardon me - "landfill"] but recently had their licence heavily expanded - then were sold to a major city over a hundred miles away). A city that now trucks their garbage something like 250 miles ... and over an international border. It took millions of years to make the petroleum ... and we've been using it, often wastefully, for the past hundred years - did you hear that: "hundred years" - like it's going out of style. It's not going out of style, in fact, the demand is increasing. Unfortunately - it's availability is decreasing. In addition ... have you heard U.S. folks recently whining about the increase in cost of gas (Canadians, too, but we've been paying some more for some time)? In those threads, we had some Europeans telling how they've been paying $5.00 or so for gas for some time. Have you ever heard the saying that, "Necessity is the mother of invention"? Guess who have been studying, working on, building, evaluating and revamping, various means of production of electricity from renewable resources in recent years. It was the Europeans ... not us North Americans, continuing to walk (no, "drive") along our paths of cheap energy availability. Much less, until recently, concerned to find alternative sources of energy. Additionally - cheap food, which has been our policy for years, is finished. Not only was our food cheaper than in many areas, the fact that our incomes were larger meant also that it consumed a much lower percentage of our total incomes. By the way ... some time ago, on a similar thread, I reported another frugal situation, which someone said that she'd never thought of, but was impressed by. I took some hamburger and peas out of the freezer a while ago ... to let them warm up in the expensively heated air put out by the furnace. I'm cooking a pot of rice ... so took the lid off of the rice cooker and put an aluminum pie plate on there, then put the peas on it, then another aluminum plate with the hamburg on that, with another plate or the pot lid set down on top. Two/three birds - one stone. Good wishes for making good use of a lovely spring weekend - it's snowing, here ... again! ole joyful

I have a different spin. He is a Quack for the most part. While most of his potions and tonics are harmless, they are also useless because they are diluted so heavily. He is also a known Fraud. He claims to be a Master Gardner which he is not. He has never attended an accredited Master Gardner program from any university or horticulture program. At the same time his bug killer recipe was deadly and extremely toxic making your own nicotine sulfate. If diluted as he recommended was OK, but keeping a quart bottle of Nicotine Sulfate around is very dangerous. It does not have to be ingested to be deadly as it is easily absorbed in the skin. You can buy books that have the same recipe to kill your lover applying it to clothes like underwear over a period of a week. He had one potion some found useful at times like a back yard Bar-B-Q of 1 tablespoon of Lemon Ammonia and 1 Tablespoon of dish soap to 1 gallon of water to spray down the area. It did make things smell nice and drove insects away for a day or so. But what he did not say is it can damage plants by washing off a protective wax called cuticle. Now if you like organics and quirky potions then the real Deal is my ole friend Paul James from Tulsa OK has a few books on the subject with a zany spin on life. To bad HGTV is no longer a source of Garden information. Just high end home construction. Paul was the best they had and the real deal Master Gardner.