You need the coat to go check out your garden or see what is buried under snow at least or shovel it, can't work out if you are cold! I think the cat is a hoot!! I'd smile every time I went by it! The shovel & rooster plaques are really neat too. Great haul & wonderful prices! Jan

Tootie: I greatly enjoyed your pictures. A silly question if I may, are the white planters tires? They look so neat and clean. Your photos are great and of course kitty looks like the royalty that all felines truly are. Kate

Sweetheart, I find cool garden stuff all the time. If I brought it all home, I'm afraid my place would look like Sanford and Son. This particular shop (which IS my favorite, really) always has a great variety of garden stuff. There's a section in the front of the store with pots and ornaments, and there's iron stuff and fabulous vintage metal garden furniture out in the yard in front. The prices are great! Last year, I passed up a cast iron garden arch, with roses on it, and I'm sorry now that I did. I didn't follow my own rule ... if I see it and I love it, I buy it. I worry about where to put it later. (you should see the stuff I have stored in my sheds! I will probably introduce blog readers to the stash, one day. I tend to share a lot of weird stuff on my blog.) Have you thought about going to a salvage yard to see what you can find? We have two down this way (Caravati's and Governor's in Richmond, to be exact) and both have a good selection of stuff that can be repurposed into the garden. How about using mid-century decorative iron porch columns to support a trellis or pergola? Don't forget Craig's List! So many of my garden/building items have come from there. I have a whole shed full of cast-off windows that will we will use to complete my greenhouse later this year (she said, optimistically). The cobblestones that edge the bed on the south side of my house are a CL find, too. (so is my pick-up truck, which I consider to be garden-related.) The idea is to keep an open mind when one shops, and to always consider a "garden purpose" for an item that may not seem, at first, to be garden material ... if that's your style, of course. Connie

When I hear about taking truckloads of new stuff to the landfill ... I cry a bit. I live within a couple of miles of a "landfill" (double four-letter word for a "dump" - also a four-letter word, as you may notice). A couple of years ago the local owner of a "landfill" had its capacity licence increased from 9 million to 17 million tons ... and I figured at the time that I knew what'd be coming next, as the City of Toronto, 2.5 million or so, has been taking flack for years for shipping their garbage to a site near Detroit. A year or so ago Toronto bought this dump ... for $220 million. They've been shipping something like 140 semi-s a day over the border, and will soon ship them next door. The site is right beside the freeway from Toronto to Detroit, so I expect them to build a new exit ramp ... right into the dump! Could you spare a tear or two for my predicament? ole joyfilled (usually) P.S. Being frugal (having helped folks who'd left their former lives in just the clothes that they wore, get their lives back together in an area recently visited by war), I hate seeing useful things scrapped. And did so long before the recent furore over the expansion of the local dump. o j