Used coffee grounds are my favorite 'green'. Fresh cut grass is my other favorite green, but it is not available year-round as the grounds are. Starbucks can provide a 100 pounds a week, if you collect them properly. That means you get on good enough terms with the employees to have them understand you will be glad to take ALL the grounds they can provide. Otherwise they will give you one bag a visit. I have not been in the store in three years. My hatchback contains a couple of Rubbermaids and a long-forked tool to grasp the knot in the grounds bag. It takes practice to get the bag out without ripping it open, even with two bags used. The bag is lifted out of the dumpster into the Rubbermaid container. If any grounds or trash are spilled on the ground, they are cleaned up with a brush and tray. Starbucks does not directly encourage gardeners to collect out of the dumpster, and one has the responsibility to leave the dumpster as one finds it. On one visit to the store, no grounds were available and I asked if I could look in the dumpster. Five bags were in it, and on future visits I never went back in the store for fear that some legal-minded employee would tell me differently. Interestingly, the grounds in the dumpster are more to my liking than the bags the employees give you. The higher moisture content means they do not clump up the way the espresso grounds do. On the other hand, the bags of loose grounds and filters found in the dumpster also have trash in them. The average person who goes into Starbucks and is given a bag of grounds (some of the new fancy silver bags only hold about seven pounds of used grounds) probably is not aware that Starbucks trashes 70-90% of used grounds (my estimate) Seven-bin Bob

Yes, but I see that as a logical development of the ideal that had been in fashion since before the turn of the 20th century, bossyvossy. Recently, I was reading a book written in 1910 that talked about "preternaturally slim" models, and Colette wrote very early in her newspaper days about the "religion of hunger" followed by fashionable ladies. As more and more people managed to achieve it, they had to keep moving the goal posts, which is how we eventually wound up with heroin chic and pre-pubescent models.

Kim, Hooray for the miraculous recovery. I had a lemon garden for a couple of years and it was one of the most fun things I've ever done. It was so fun to hunt down all the plants that had lemon scents, lemon colors and lemony names. I still have my potted lemon tree. Don't forget Lemon Boy tomato for your lemon garden! Hazel, There are people who take theme gardens to extremes that I never would, but that is partly because I grow so many edibles. Many (though not all) theme gardens are built around a backbone of small trees, shrubs and perennials that fit the theme, with annuals as needed. Within the confines of growing an edible garden with only a few perennials on the edges, I have grown rainbow gardens many times---where each raised bed featured one color of the rainbow, in the same order that the colors appear in the rainbow. I did that for 4 or 5 years and it really broadened my exposure to veggies, herbs and flowers of every color. Of course, the colors green and blue were the most challenging as this was well before we had actual blue tomatoes, but I still grew an old heirloom variety of tomato called "Blue" though it certainly did not have blue fruit. It had fruit that was blackish-pinkish-purplish and wasn't worth eating either. I'd like to do it again sometimes, but it does take an enormous amount of planning, plus an enormous amount of seed-starting to have plants from every color of the rainbow. Still, I'm glad I did it. I'd never grown many green flowers before that (only Envy zinnia) and found it fun to grow Bells of Ireland, Green Wizard rudbeckia and green-flowering gladiolus. I was younger then and had a lot more energy and spent a lot more time in the garden in the heat of the summer. I've also grown a Chocolate Garden at times, featuring plants that produced dark flowers, dark foliage or dark produce (Chocolate popcorn, chocolate tomatoes like Cherokee Chocolate and Chocolate Stripes, Chocolate Habanero peppers, etc), dark colored flowers (basically dark red or maroonish flowers that could sort of pass for chocolate), and chocolate-scented flowers. Just thinking about all the work I did with those theme gardens in those years makes me tired now. I wonder where I found the energy back then? Dawn

Re: the notoriously bad parking lots. One reason to love TJ's besides their groceries is that they seldom will build a new building for their stores. They locate in vacant storefronts in strip mall locations and the parking lots are often inadequate for the increased traffic from a TJ's. Ours in Oly isn't too bad if you time your visit to off peak hours. I find that early morning and evening just before closing are both good. Early morning, when it first opens there is a rush of seniors who seem to want to always be first in line for everything, but if you wait about 30 min, they have finished their shopping and there is a lull until the parents who've dropped off their kids at school show up. 8:20 - 9 a.m. is perfect at my store. Sometimes the shelves are picked over just before closing, but the stock is often in the back waiting to be shelved. So if you ask, they will see if stuff you want is in the back. I once rushed to get there before they closed and commented to the checker that I was worried I wouldn't make it before closing and he told me that if you are IN the store at closing they won't hurry you to leave. They are stocking shelves for a while anyway, so as long as you're there, you can shop. I don't know if that is company policy, but it sounded like it.