Vera you are so lucky with the containers! Here every once in a while I am at Lowes or Wal mart at the right time and get a few. Not even close enough for what I really need. Just spend over 100 Dollars yesterday for pots so I can re pot some brugs. Some tropical trees. Hell I do not know WHY I am growing them. WHERE am I going to put them in the winter? I bought this HUGE Box of MG fertilzer. That has these sprayer refill packets in there. I think there should be around 10 of those in the box. Before that I bought little boxes and I could have sworn too that the numbers on those were different. I guess it is for all different needs folks have. My neighbor ask me yesterday what that plant was that is growing wild in the middle of the tilled area I want to make another flowerbed. It is a Datura inoxia. I told her. She said, you know, when you gave the plants last year to my house for my mom to enjoy, they must have reseeded lol. She has them growing in the one bed and wants to have it more in the middle. I told here I got some left in a small nursery pot from winter sowing and will plant it for her when she goes on vacation today for a week. I told myself that no more indoor sowing with Dats. The germinate a lot better direct sown and also grow into healthier plants. From what I have been watching so far. Can not wait till you share pictures of your beauties that make you happy Lucy

Hope you caught these persnickitydesign posts: "It was pretty much a full time job (plus overtime) and it still took a year and a half for me to get everything purchased & everyone lined up. ...One of my oldest & dearest friends' DH owns the HVAC company. He did our house at cost. Another owns the company that did our fireplace and garage doors. He also worked at the lumber yard for years and gave us the names of many of the subs that we ended up using. ...our friends came by to help us out and worked for free" "Our permits were $433. We're on county water & sewer and did have to pay a tap-in fee of $1067. There were no charges for the gas and power." "We are fortunate enough to live in an area where the cost of living (and cost to build) is extremely low. Plan prices are not mentioned. Also, keep in mind the year of the build--2008. There was a wee bit of a recession going on then, centred on the collapsing housing market. Trades were desperate for work, suppliers for customers. I had the fortune to build in earlier declines. With cash in hand, you were like a god.Now, not so much.

Company auctions plug flats with 50-250 plugs per flat. They sell a range of flowering plants from petunias to cannas, ornamental grasses, and vegetables. Shipping for the first flat is around twenty bucks but additional flats are around 7. I've purchased from them for years and their plants are always packed well, hydrated and fresh and arrive in a couple days. Prices ordinarily range from $10-$30 per flat, some are higher, and for popular items like ornamental grass or tomatoes the auction process will elevate prices. As well as auctions, there are slightly higher priced 'buy it now' flats. Note that for the #250 flats each plug is pretty small, about the size of a thimble, but if you are willing to baby them along you can get incredible deals. The deals are even better if you choose perennials, because for a one time investment of time and effort and a little money, you can get masses of hundreds echinacea or other flowering perennials.

Wow! Yeah the tornado last year hit me in NE Oklahoma too. Luckily, except one tiny spot about 50'x30' which happened to be right in the middle of my backyard garden, it didn't touch ground, just destroyed the tops of all my trees. Thank God, after years of procrastinating, just the winter before I'd paid an arborist a good chunk of cash to come out and seriously thin all dead wood and such from those, and some branches to restore me some sun, or I'd have gotten more than a gigantic branch from my sweet gum slammed through my brand new porch door. But in the garden -- barely missing by about two feet, a very big un-mortared cinderblock setup that would have been really bad added to that swirling -- it twisted a well-anchored tall metal garden arbor structure into a total pretzel, tore the wood fence behind all my cattlepanel trellising arches into many pieces, and "sucked up" the ground UNDER the black mat of the ground area that had been hard and solid for 17 years. Now there's this bizarre mini-mountain mounds of the softest dirt ever underneath it. I'm fixing to go rip up weeds and cut out all the mat so I can level the ground and reapply it. Suction, so weird! PJ