michael's. look at the bottom of the rows in the bead section and you'll find these perfect little plastic zipper bags about 1.5x3". like 200 to a box, and couple bucks for that whole box. not sure, but would be willing to bet that walmart may carry them, too and if they do they'd be cheaper. but with a 40% off coupon, which is just about every week in the sunday paper, you could get a box from the craft place for next to nothing. i love being able to see what and how much is in the packet at a glance. some folks cut little cards to put in them, some take the white labels or masking tape and put on them, and some write directly on them w/sharpie. i do a lot of the last, 'cause i'm lazy, but the labels and card stock work better and are easier to read and change if you reuse the envelope. if you save a lot of the same seed, i found it was easy enough to make a little label sized box in a design program so i could print a bunch of the same label, and not have to handwrite each one. you can even include a picture. for bigger seeds or larger amounts of seed, i save my old packets that have the self stick tabs, and just slap a label or masking tape over top of what was in there. along the same lines, i always save the little glassine envelopes for fine seed or tiny amounts after i've used up seed that came in them. just call me a pack rat!

Thanks Denise! As the saying goes "We've got to start somewhere" -- so "let it begin in me." This is a response from my friend, Linda. She's full of good ideas: ~ ~ ~ Kiddos, HEB and Walmart sell the cloth bags and they are nice and big and $1. HEB's are green and Walmart's are black. I like the big square bottom of HEB's better because it holds it's shape better but both are nice for a buck. They are always in the trunk of my car. Take them inside any store with you when you are shopping. From Costco to Dilliards, they work everywhere! You can go on line and buy cloth bags of allllll kinds too. I keep my plastic produce bags in my cloth bags and reuse them over and over and over........... I guess we could buy the paper lunch sacks and use those but most veggies/fruits are wet or moist and the paper wouldn't last long in the produce section. For those who sew it wouldn't take much of nothing to make their own reusable veggies bags. You could even use left over scraps of material to make them or you could go designer. Walmart has TONS of cute, cheap material with veggie/fruit patterns on them. What a nice gift it would make! I would love a set of fruit and veggie bags that had been custom made for me. Christmas is around the corner. It would make a good fund raiser also for schools or churches. We could raise awareness for our kids on recycling! Old T-shirts would work great too. They stretch. Old pillowcases could be cut in half and 2 bags could be made out of one pillowcase for lettuce and potatoes for example. I wished I sewed and had a machine. It would be worth it just to watch people's faces as you pull out all your creations at the check out stand! ha We gotta start somewhere. The email Ragna sent me regarding the plastic bags was toooooooooo alarming. I have ALWAYS recycled like a maniac. I have a big 3 drawer Tupperware bin in my kitchen. The top drawer is for plastic. In this I put plastic bags, and alllllllllllll the plastic wrapping that comes off so much stuff! The plastic that covers your paper towels, toilet paper rolls, dry cleaning bags, retired Ziploc bags etc. goes in that drawer. I smuggle those into the plastic bag recycle bins at the store,it is all the same stuff. All can be recycled. I am shocked to have learned how expensive it is to do so, however. I am trying to get away from stuff like Ziploc bags in the first place. Any more ideas? I would love any suggestion anybody has. Thanks, Linda ~ ~ ~ And I too would love to hear any suggestions you all might have. Roselee/Ragna

Even before Jen posted this, I was telling my husband about hearing it and being sad that I missed seeing Sedaris in my backyard. Then he suggested maybe we could do a road trip to catch another performance. He was probably thinking a place like D.C. I said well, I have checked the schedule and he'll be in Australia in January. I may have overplayed my hand. I think I'll recheck the schedule and see if there's a city - with a sports team - that we haven't visited and see about a weekend away. Unfortunately, we've already been to Dallas but I suppose we could repeat, we had a nice time.

Well, I hope that someone found it, bought it and took it home with them where it hopefully is someplace warm and frost-free/freeze-free. My big tomato plant is happily residing upstairs in the spare room right beside a south-facing window. I talk to it, thump its blossoms and check its soil moisture daily. A couple of lady bugs that were attempting to overwinter by hibernating in a corner of the spare room woke up in Tuesday's hot weather and now are climbing all over the plants in the room. They must think it is Spring. I do hope the folks at Home Depot in Gainesville brought in all those plants from the garden center or covered them up with a very heavy-duty frost blanket row cover because they had hundreds and hundreds of plants in stock over the weekend. If they had moved the plants, shelving racks and all, someplace indoors it would have filled up an entire 2-car garage with little room to spare, so it was a substantial number of plants. . And, those are just the vegetables, fruits (strawberry plants) and herbs. I'm not as worried about the shrubs and perennials they had on display. On Tuesday it hit 79 degrees at our Mesonet station and 77 degrees at our house, and it didn't just feel warm, it almost felt hot. That sort of weather could give a person planting fever. The bees and the wasps were swarming all day. This morning, though, reality returned and it was 26 degrees at our house and 23 degrees at our Mesonet station this morning around sunrise. Gainesville is at a higher elevation so they might have been slightly warmer, but probably not by much. Our weather is nuts. We've had more than the usual number of grass fires the last couple of days, which is par for the course as winter deepens and fine fuels like grasses become more cured following freezing weather. I'm surprised how many plants have popped up in stores across the state this past week. Even some cool-season plants can freeze or suffer damage with temperatures in the lower 20s, especially if they just came out of a climate-controlled greenhouse before they were shipped to the stores. I just don't understand why so many stores so far north have so many plants. Of course, the stores are happy to sell the plants. And, for the folks who buy those plants and put them into the ground too early, the stores then will happily sell them replacement plants. It is a great business model for the stores---the more plants they sell early which then freeze, the more plants they sell later to replace the frozen ones.