Glad you've joined us, gayled, welcome to the NE forum! My DH and I are retired. We work together in the gardens... our spring techniques are pretty simple. 1. Clean up dead leaves and foliage and weed underneath plants... but not as early as we'd like this year. Probably not until April .... if we get more snow this week. 2. One of our earliest tasks every spring.... amend the soil. I think that's the best thing you can do for the gardens. We get free compost from our town.... dig it and take it. We've done this for the last eight years and it's really helped improve the gardens. While it's not exactly "organic" because the compost is made from garden waste that people bag and the city picks up, "free" makes it worthwhile. 3. We like to use bark mulch and I use cocoa mulch in a few special areas, but this has gotten expensive as our gardens have grown. We've found that the compost works like mulch by breaking down over the season. So we mulch every other year. 3. Fertilize? No, not even our roses. I think good soil is better than chemical applications. I learned about composting from my mother who was a wonderful gardener. Mom collected coffee grounds in one container (for her Mt. Laurels and rhododendrons) and egg shells & other wastes that she'd spread around her flower beds. Over 40 years of this gave her a yard with deep, dark soil and lots of worms. 4. My DH put in an irrigation system several years ago and he checks this early in the spring. We have a long yard with gardens down one side and around a garden shed. The days of dragging the hose around are gone for us. Molie

I read the Bismarck ND tribune on line everyday. I think a subscription for out of state is maybe around 400 dollars already. In state the last I know it was 240 and that was about 15 years ago. I can't afford it. I like to keep up on things there. I just found out that my last great aunt died at the age of 98. Some of the news is online before it is in the daily paper though. I don't understand why they do that. We subscibe to the small town local paper here in our county. It is about 28 dollars a month. I too started getting it so I would get to know about some of the people here and what was going on when I moved here. I also got another small town one the first one or two years but I cancelled that one. I sometimes read the Pierre Capital Journal on line. There is a paper that comes out of Pierre that is free. It is the want ads and flyers from the CPJ so I see what is on sale and the rummage sales if I am going to Pierre.

Those lights do make a difference especially during the winter months. I grow my AV's and Gesneriads under them, my orchids are happy on the window ledge. Rosie

I save all plastic bags and give them to my sister to crochet mats for the homeless. She can use any that's he can cut loops out of including toilet paper ones if you open the ends instead of tearing down the side. I takes 5 or 600 bags to make one mat. she can also use dry cleaning bags, .like I said it would be any cylindrical bags. The mats are 6 ft long and 2 1/2 feet wide and have a carrying handle and loops to hold them together when they carry them. I save bread bags. I use those for all kinds of things. I guess o got that from my DM. I have just started using worn out socks for rags. My DH goes through socks fast. I use single slippers for on my Swiffer. I saved the bottom part of my old litter box and cleaned it up really good and use that for soaking clothes in OXy CLean. I also save twisty ties. I have some of those nut jars too. Mine had fruit in them at the restaurants I cooked at. Here is the big one. I save almost all of the glass jars that I get. I use them for canning. If they have the rubber inside of the lid they work. I like the small ones, so if I want to give something to somebody They don't have to return the jar. I always make pickled beets and give some away. I boil the lids just like I would Kerr or Ball lids and fill the jars and screw them on tight. I had one jar that wouldn't work once because the lid wouldn't tighten. It just kept turning. I just made sure I used that one first. then I threw it away. I also put other things in them