My frugality is based on the idea that I am trying to make my gardening a cost-effective hobby. Mainly, I don't want to end up spending more money on my garden that I would just buying the veggies from the store. But I understand economies of scale, and that its very hard to do that in some cases. But here are some things I typically do: I almost never buy plants. I start almost everything from seed. This includes tomatoes, peppers, etc, which you can sometimes make a good argument for buying plants. But I just think it makes no sense to buy a plant for $3.00 and if you are lucky you can recoup the price of it with your harvest. But some things make no sense: I've seen cilantro plants, cabbage plants, lettuce plants, etc for sale at home depot for $2-$3 each. Now that makes no sense to me at all. You can buy a bunch of cilantro for $1 at the supermarket. Besides it bolts so quickly anyway. Same with lettuce. I can buy a head of cabbage for $1.50. Makes a ton more sense for seeds. Even squash, I've seen small squash plants for $2.00 at HD, and I;m thinking... if I put a seed in a pot, it will be that size anyway in a couple weeks, plus they do much better direct seeded. - Save seeds - I save spinach seeds since they have such a short shelf life. I also save lettuce seeds and various others. Only inconvenience is that they take up garden space while the seeds mature. - I use ivory soap for bugs - Besides wanting to go organic, I have a hard time justifying buying insecticide for $10 for trying to fix a problem a plant that at most might give me a couple bucks worth of produce. And even the organic insecticidal soaps are expensive as well. But I just buy an ivory soap bar, and grate it with a kitchen grater, then mix it as needed with water. - pots - I use extra, unneeded plastic cups for pots. There is a restaurant we eat at called "Dickey's BBQ" that always gives is these plastic yellow cups. So I save them, and have quite a collection. I just punch a hole in the bottom, and use them as pots.

I just got lots and lots of seed packets at our local Dollar General stores in September (I'm in SW IN). They are regular price 2/$1 or $3/1. They put the garden stuff on clearance in September. We paid $0.02, or $0.03, or $0.05 a packet for seeds! Yippee. Got lots of vegetables and even more flower seeds. Way more than we can plant. But, my kids really enjoy gardening, and I'm not great at it. So, I figured, it won't cost me much for us to try and fail with all these. I'm planning to let the kids help me trying them different ways, like inside, winter sown outside, planting after the frosts, starting in the greenhouse. I figure we'll probably learn a lot and if I keep track of it okay. Then, the year after that I probably will make better use of the money I spend on gardening, cause I'll have made lots of mistakes with my super-discounted seed collection! PS. I fully intend on searching for more seeds next year, too. But, the awesome prices I got will help me have the willpower to wait til September not waste $$ paying full price when the displays start popping up in early spring! :)

So neat woodyoak! I've often thought about using that copper tubing to make an obelisk, but have never worked up the courage ;-) How did you connect the ends of the ring? Weld or something else? I don't do anything much. My 'Sorbet' has been fairly upright so far and hasn't needed any supporting. For a very tall lactiflora type peony I use sticks as stakes and sort of weave twine inbetween to contain the plant. A third peony has very heavy double flowers- I have wire fencing (like on the roll) cut down to encircle the plant. It grows up and when the blooms get weighed down by the rain they can just rest their heads on the fence, lol. Thanks for sharing your great idea! CMK

Below is a link for a thread under this forum on coral peonies. It explains it pretty well. I do have Pink Hawaiian Coral, but do not own a Coral Charm. PHC blooms very early and is done for another year. I have no complaints about it. Hope this helps. If the link should fail, I just googled peony + coral. Here is a link that might be useful: Coral peonies