It's a game of sorts. I pride myself on how much gardening I can accomplish without spending and yet, axillary costs can add up. I often drive to a horse farm to get free manure. Over the course of the spring, summer, and fall, I probably make between eight and ten trips. It's about 25 miles round trip. However, if I do so on Sunday mornings, church takes up about half of those miles. Just take off your suit coat, put on the boots and load 23 five gallon containers of horse manure into your little red Neon. You can then add, old wooden pallets for raised beds, freebie leaves, UCG, free cycle windows for the raised beds, etc. I wonder how much I spend on gas each year to get my free stuff. Heck, it's a game and, quite frankly, it's fun.

Gean, I have thought about that, and my ideas on the subject are these: I have no moral obligation to conduct my life so as to avoid possible waste on the part of posterity. How can I know anyway what will happen after I'm dead, and, as long as I'm responsible and positive in my lifetime, why should I worry about it? True, perhaps the garden will end up in the hands of insensitive jerks who will bulldoze it, but on the other hand it may become the property of unspeakably thrilled horticulturalists. If I don't have to sell our place out of financial necessity before I die, it will go to our daughter. There's a good chance she won't want to live here--but then perhaps she will--and I don't think she's going to be a fanatical gardener like me--but maybe I'm mistaken. Or she could marry a husband who loves to garden. Or I could establish a foundation to maintain the garden and keep it open for visits and teaching. I don't know what the future will bring. About the maintenance, I already have more garden than I can keep up with. As I said, the reason I'm in such a hurry now is because I want to get the heavy work done while my husband can still do it: we need to dig our holes NOW, and afterwards the lilacs can grow in peace. I don't see why I shouldn't be pruning roses, pulling grass, and repotting plants when I'm eighty. My desire has always been a low-maintenance garden, without watering system, elaborate fertilizing regimen, or plants that require a significant amount of work on an ongoing basis. Peonies are my kind of plant: once you've dug the holes and planted them, you're basically done forever. I work on getting the soil in good condition and then planting it with plants that will grow well, protect each other, suffocate weeds, and so on: I'm working on creating a relatively stable ecosystem. Obviously it will never be completely labor free, being a garden, but I think I can make a garden that will be able to stand up to some neglect. My garden isn't a financial investment: the money comes from income that's there to spend, not out of retirement savings. I'm like cweathersby: my money goes to the garden, and most of the garden money goes for plants. My clothes come from Goodwill, and I shop there on half price day. The car we drive is the worst wreck in the township. I don't care: what matters to me are the hyacinths I planted years ago that come up faithfully, and to my surprise appear to be seeding as well. I didn't know hyacinths did that. The peonies that are budding now, the snow crocuses that have somehow spread down into the big garden, the wildish area where the Viburnum burkwoodii is getting ready to flower and where the wild hellebore we transplanted two years ago has caught and is growing. The garden is a possible source of future income, all the same. I think it can be a workable display and teaching garden, something our province can really use. I'd hope to earn at least enough money to hire help now and then to keep the garden going. I don't believe I'm going to starve in old age, but I have no expectations of even relative affluence. The garden is an investment in another sense: when I can no longer afford to buy many new plants, I'll have a good supply of material to swap for plants, and to give as gifts. If you can give, you're rich. A final word about bulldozed gardens. Human life is full of waste: I realize this when I see old abandoned houses and barns around here that are fine examples of brick- and stonework and that are collapsing because no one has any use for them any more. Lord help us, just think of war. Yes, my garden may meet a dreary end one day--or it may not--but does that mean it wasn't worth doing? And not just for my own joy. I profoundly believe that my garden is not just for me: I certainly don't deserve such a large and magnificent share of the world's largesse. I don't want to be like the giant who chased all the children out of his beautiful garden so he could enjoy it all on his own. I give cuttings and rooted plants, bits of succulents, bulbs and iris tubers. Even if my garden is destroyed (and maybe they'll miss some of the better hidden parts), it will live on in other people's gardens. When someone comes to visit the garden and see plants she's never heard of, or roses such as she didn't know existed, or a style of gardening that she didn't know was possible--carries those memories away and perhaps puts some of them into practice in her own patch of ground--my garden will live. Permanence--immortality--call it what you will--is not the issue: the patient, fatiguing, and often frustrating cultivation of goodness and honesty and beauty is. To quote Dickens, who is writing about a man's death at the end of a rightly lived life: "It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!" As the actions of the good man live after his death, so the shared garden will never die. Melissa

Same for me, as much as possible. I still work full time too, but I retired in '06 from the Navy reserve, so at least now I have my weekends. I go out in the mornings and walk around the garden to look at everything while I drink my coffee. In the afternoons, I get outside as quickly as possible so that I'm really dirty by the time DH gets home. I know that if I look really scroungy and sweaty he won't ask me to make dinner. And of course, housecleaning, laundry and dishes are out of the question too. So I'd say about 4-5 hours on the weekdays, 10-12 hours on weekends. I confess, I hired an electrician to run a wire out to the potting shed and install a light and some outlets so I can stay out after dark. I also had electricity run to the greenhouse for the heater and swamp cooler and have 6 extra outlets in there too. I have everything out there now but a KITCHEN and who needs one of those??????!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH......... Cheryl

Well, once again, I did it! I have a tendency to shop until I drop ... all the while forgetting what I've already gotten for the kids! When the time comes to pull it all out and wrap it up, I think "oh crap, look at all this stuff I bought them!" ... :-) But you know what? I take great joy in seeing their faces. In watching them enjoy their new things ... especially when they open something they *really, really* wanted! Priceless! This year my kids got many gift certificates, and yesterday we took the kids shopping with their gift certificates. My husband told me after we got home that my stepdaughter spent one of her certificates on a birthday gift for me (my birthday's in a few days). How special is that? I'm humbled and honored!