I was going to start a new posting when someone was talking about plant labels, but searched first and found this and figured that I would add it here instead... hopefully it gets found if people are interested. I found this trick in a magazine, and although the markers aren't as attractive as the commercial ones, when I am doing hundreds of seedlings, I am more worried about cost effective than beauty. Heavy duty plastic knives with either permanent marker or a printed label work wonders. They are way tougher than any commercial plastic markers I have found, go into the ground very easily without breaking, and are quick and cheap! I buy mine at Costco in a box of 600 for around $9. I use them for everything from marking my seedling trays, to marking the actual garden perrennials. Julie

I really like the gray produce crates. I am guessing those are the ones that stack one way and nest the other way. The only problem is I don't have an enclosed truck to take to market. I have a small enclosed trailer, but most of the spring I use it to haul seedlings. Then in the summer, I try to take the least amount to market, only my truck. Unless it is raining. Also, my wife sells at a small market on the same day I sell at the larger one She needs the trailer. The containers I use are able to be be closed and they keep my produce dry. Important if it starts to rain. At market when it starts to rain, I can just run around and put lids on tubs. Also, when stacked up, they stay cool. I don't put tomatoes in the fridge, but they are stored in my cool basement. At market, when I open up a new tub, they are always cool. Marla, On tomatoes, I just sell them out of the tubs. I also usually sell anything I have a large quantity of out of the larger tubs. My problem is I can't get enough tubs on the tables I have. I am also limited in my stall space. So adding more tables won't work. So the 1020's allow me to put many different products on the table. I stack my produce pretty high. Jay

Hmmmm......... I tend to buy a lot of books from garage sales and rummage sales. In Ottawa there's a once a year event called the Great Glebe Garage Sale when a whole neighborhood in the middle of the city throws a MASSIVE garage sale. Something like 5 (if not more!) city blocks of just garage sales. This year I picked up an incomplete set of something called "The Greatest Works of Literature" plus an incomplete set of a series called Great Ideas plus a massive dictionary, a total of about 20 hard bound books for Cdn$25. (The 3 foot tall plush toy of Wile Coyote for $4 was from a different seller) There's also some nice used bookstores in the Ottawa area but they can't beat a good garage sale. For paperbacks, there's a flea market out in Carp every Sunday that has a pretty good selection of half-decent paperbacks. There's also a neat used bookstore here that also has some cheaper new books. They used to have dirt cheap prices until they cleaned up the place and started charging more. They even have some out of print books that I haven't been able to find anywhere else. I do sometimes go to Chapters to splurge as well. I used to do that quite a bit in the past until I realized that, not only was I paying premium prices, but that some of the books weren't that good! I figure that if I buy a book at a garage sale, it's ok if it's not very good. At least it's cheap. I sometimes shop at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca if I need a book that's out of print or if I need a book that's a specialty book. Oh, and if you're Canadian and you need an American book, sometimes it's a lot cheaper to buy it from Amazon.com than Amazon.ca. I needed a late edition book for work and it was being sold on Amazon.ca for Cdn$400. I found it on Amazon.com for US$100. And yes. I need more bookcases.

I think that my biggest inspiration for my garden was a neighbor growing up. She had beautiful mixed borders with perennials, flowering trees, and shrubs. However, I was terrified of her since she didn't like kids and would yell at me for even stopping on the sidewalk to look, so I looked from a distance or as we drove by or walking slowly as a came home from school. I also have a friend that I met when I was 10 whose parents also had mixed borders with roses and crabapples and grapes and perennials. I loved their gardens as well. My grandfather, who we visited in the summer, had a rural garden of old-fashioned cottage garden plants - Hydrangeas, poppies, peonies, iris, sweet peas, violas, asparagus, quince, roses, and an apple tree. There were many more, but those are what remain in my memory, and a few remain in my garden from divisions taken after they had both died and the house was up for sale. My folks took us to the Holden Arboretum regularly and we often detoured through a cemetery with beautiful plantings, so much of what I saw trained my eye, even though I grew up in a house of non-gardeners. Now I get a lot of my inspiration from gardens I visit (I love the Open Days sponsored by the Garden Conservancy and other open garden fundraisers), on line from blogs and here on GW, and from eye candy books from the library.