Category Archives: gardening

Seeds vs. seedlings

frugal strategies, gardening,

>>have you ever figured out if it is better to plant (mostly i am talking about vegetables) from seeds or from seedlings? i am trying to decide if it pays to buy plants, or if it is a needless waste of money. i don’t exactly have a green thumb, in case that impacts your answer. also, what do you think about planting fruit trees? is it frugal?<<

I got my seed catalog a few weeks ago and have been enjoying poring over it and deciding what to plant for the coming spring/summer.  Before beginning to garden, I never would have understood the enjoyment to be found in looking through a seed catalog!

Seeds are always the most frugal; you can buy 2 -3 packets of open pollinated tomato seeds that will grow hundreds of plants for what you’ll pay for one tomato start.   When you buy a seedling, you’re paying for the foresight that the nursery has shown in starting the seeds indoors so you can get a jump on the planting season.

How much you’ll benefit from using seedlings or seeds will depend on the length of your planting season.  If you have a shorter season, then you’ll want to transplant your seedlings to maximize your time.  If you live in a warmer climate, then sometimes you aren’t gaining more than two weeks, since the seeds planted in the ground once it’s warm generally take off really fast.

But you can start your own seeds indoors and then have your own seedlings to transplant at a fraction of the cost – this is the direction I’d go in, if cost is an issue.  They’ll need warmth, moisture, and light after the seeds germinate.  Most seeds really aren’t a big deal to start yourself.  I’ll probably start some seeds indoors again this year, even though it didn’t make a huge difference to me in getting a start on my garden last year.  I’m going to try a different method this year that I think will be more effective.

Another potential concern is regarding the quality of the seedlings you buy from the big box stores, which is low.  They are poorly tended, low quality hybrids, and often don’t transplant well.  They were responsible in large part for spreading the tomato blight this past year.  So even if you decide to go the route of buying them, realize that while you’re paying much more, you’re not necessarily getting much more.  If you’re going to buy them, look for transplants from reputable nurseries.

Also, as far as seeds go, keep in mind that you often can save the seeds of the vegetables you eat and grow those.  And if you save the seeds of your open pollinated plants from year to year, you’ll never need to spend anything on seeds again.  That means buying any kind of open pollinated seed can be a one time purchase – super frugal!

As far as fruit trees, I don’t see them as frugal in the short term.  It will take years until you have fruit you can harvest (taking into account halachic concerns), and this is affecting my decisions about this.  I’d been planning to buy several young fruit trees to plant in my side yard this spring, and am now thinking I’d probably be better off converting the area to grow vegetables.  But there is the long term satisfaction in being able to grow your own fruit, and eventually it becomes frugal once you’re past the preliminary years.  So we’ll probably go with the fruit trees even if something else would be more efficient in the short term.

Avivah

Fall garden clean-up

gardening

Despite me being out of things this week, the kids got a lot of yard work topped off!  It will be nice to go into the holidays having most of the signs of summer yard projects cleared away.

The 12,000 pound mountain of excavated dirt has finally all been moved – this is a major accomplishment!  Just today dd13 was talking to the daughter of one of you in a different city who mentioned seeing a picture of our yard (Google maps?) and commented on the huge pile of dirt.  Yes, that was our yard. 🙂  Once the dirt was moved, the fourth new raised garden box was put into place and filled.  Ds dumped the grass clippings from the three yards he mowed this week into these beds to boost the soil – grass clippings are high quality soil enhancers.  Since the grass that would have lined the paths was killed when the dirt was on top of it, the kids spread a thick layer of the wood chips we got for free last week around the beds.  It looks nice and neat now.

My plan is to build up the soil for the coming season by starting now and let the beds ‘cook’ over the next few months.  Soil strength/quality in large part determines the size of your crop, the nutritional value, and resistance to disease, and once I’m taking the time to garden, I want to get the most value out of it that I can.

As I write ds8 and ds10 are pulling up the summer garden plants in the lasagna beds. When they’re done, the last load of dirt will be spread on top, and then the rest of the wood chips will cover all of it.  The dirt and wood chips provide a lot of biological ‘brown’ and will need to be balanced with ‘greens’ to eficiently break down. I’ll be adding the usual kitchen vegetable/fruit scraps and whatever grass clippings and leaves I can get before winter.  I have about 3 – 4 gallons of ashes from our campfire that we’ll sprinkle over all the raised beds and the lasagna beds.  Then I’ll let the sun and rain and time do the rest of the work. 🙂

One thing that will remain of the garden will be some of its fruits – several of our simanim (symbolically eaten foods) for the Rosh Hashana dinners were freshly picked today and are being roasted together – butternut squash, leeks, and beets.  And the apples weren’t  ones we grew, but we did pick them yesterday afternoon.

Avivah

Gardening discoveries

frugal strategies, gardening

Remember a couple of days ago I mentioned that the pears we were planning to pick were picked when we went camping?  Yesterday I accidentally discovered the person who picked them!

It was so uncanny how this happened!  I had an errand to do and went to someone’s house I had never been to.  Walking up her front walk, I noticed vegetables growing.  So when she answered the door, I commented and told her I’d love it if she could tell me what she was growing since I didn’t recognize them all.  She responded by saying she had a lot in her back yard and offered to give me the whole tour – of course I agreed!  As we were walking in her side yard, she mentioned something about her plum tree, and I asked how they did this year, commenting that a number of the area apple and pear trees didn’t do well this year because of the late frost.  She said, there’s a tree they picked this year that had loads in the area – and I said, ‘was that in such and such a place?’.  And she said ‘yes’!  She couldn’t believe that we had gotten permission and planned to pick the very same pears. 

Towards the beginning of our discussion, I finished saying something and she said to me, “I feel like I’m listening to the other side of my brain speaking!”  We do a lot of things similarly, though she’s been gardening lots longer than me.  She used recycled lumber for her raised garden beds, is making large lasagna beds in back, and is using wood chips she got for free from the city for her beds and the paths.  This last thing was really funny, since just a few hours before I made arrangements with the tree service company taking down a neighbor’s tree to dump a half a truck load of wood chips/mulch behind my garage.  What for?  To use for my lasagna beds in back and to cover the paths between my new raised beds!  Unfortunately because of how my yard is situated, there’s not room for a dump truck to dump it directly in the yard, which means a lot of work shovelling from where they dump it into the yard.  So that was part of yesterday afternoon’s chores.  A few of the kids were swimming at a friend’s house and when I came to pick them up and their friends heard we were going home to shovel wood chips, they asked if they could come along and help.  Ane they did.  You see, fun and work don’t have to be entirely separate!  The guy who gave it to us was still working down the street and kept peeking over at us to see what we were going to do with so much mulch. 🙂

– Side comment – if you garden or use a wood stove, try contacting tree service companies to ask if they have wood mulch and/or firewood you can have.  When I asked if I could have the wood chips, he asked if I also wanted firewood – they would have given me as much as they had.  These companies are always chopping down trees and take what they have to the dump, if they don’t find anyone who wants it.  Clearly, they’re not going to spend lots of time and energy trying to find you to give it to you for free, but if you ask them and you’re close enough to the area they’re working in, chances are good they’ll be happy to give it to you for free.  Free firewood would make winter heating costs negligible, but we’re unfortunately not set up for it and when we had someone over a couple of days ago to assess what was involved in changing our heating unit, we learned that it would be expensive and complicated for us to switch to wood/coal heat. 

I also noticed she had something sprinkled on top of her lasagna beds, and asked about it – she said they were wood ashes (which is what I suspected).  Wouldn’t you know, I just brought back all the ashes from our campfire for my garden beds? 🙂

She dug up a clump of chives for me and that’s now in our garden bed, and also gave me a ground cherry for the seeds – I had never seen ground cherries growing before, though I had read about them in my catalogs and considered growing some.  So now I’ll be able to start one.  She also gave me some leek seeds.  She was growing a bunch of flowers, one of which was something that spontaneously grew in our yard that I wasn’t able to identify and ripped out because I didn’t know if it was an attractive weed or something someone would want there.  I didn’t want the seeds to fall into my lasagna beds and grow up next year without knowing what it was, so it was nice to learn what it was and I even brought some of those seeds home with me, too!

It was fun to meet  and chat with someone about these things -though I write about some of it here on my blog, I don’t usually meet people who have an active interest in it. 

Avivah

Weekly menu plan

frugal strategies, gardening, menu plans

Today ds10 asked me what we were having for lunch, and I suggested to that he start writing some ideas of what he’d like down for the week.  He ended up getting a call from a friend and going out with him, but dd13 decided to put her ideas down instead.  I asked her to make it slanted more towards non-meat meals since our camping trip was so high on the meat proteins (used 12 pounds of hamburgers, 5.5 lb beef hotdogs, and a couple of pounds of canned ground meat for chili – for three dinners).  After writing it all out, she told me now she appreciates the effort it takes for me to do it every week!  Here is what she decided on:

Shabbos – dinner – chicken breasts in coconut curry sauce; roasted root vegetables, rice, gravy, salad, pecan power bars, apples; lunch- meatballs, sweet potato pudding, marinated mushrooms, Japanese radish, sweet and sour carrots, fresh salad, hot cherry peppers, pear chutney, watermelon, pecan power bars

Sunday – b – oats and milk; l – apples and peanut butter; d – chicken coconut curry, rice, pickled veggies

Monday – b – banana bread; l – peanut butter popcorn; d – split pea soup, cornbread

Tues – b- polenta; l  – leftover split pea soup; d – pizza

Wed – b – Perfect pancakes (flour soaked overnight – not indicated in recipe); l – sweet potato fries, ricotta cheese; d – chicken noodle soup

Thurs – b- Amish oatmeal; l -to be determined; d – bean burritoes

The breakfasts will be supplemented with fruit.  Dinners and lunches are supplemented with vegetables – we’ve used a lot of our home grown veggies in the last weeks.   Almost all of the squash plants were hit by powdery mildew and are dying now, but we got a lot of nice winter squash before that hit that I’m putting in storage – mostly butternut squash, since that’s what we planted the most of, but we also have acorn squash and a couple of pumpkins.  So far our tomato plants are still doing well, despite the blight that has hit a huge number of gardeners across the country.

I really would like to put in our fall/winter garden right away, but haven’t yet done it because I don’t have compost to add to the soil.  Last Shabbos we had an organic landscaper and his family for Shabbos lunch, and he told me to speak to him since he sometimes comes across stuff that would be good for boosting soil quality for free that he’d be happy to pass on to me.  If I can get a truckload of stuff this week (not likely, but you never know!), then I’ll try to get the cold weather seeds in.  I specifically ordered a bunch of seeds that can flourish in the winter in my part of the country, mostly green leafy vegetables, to supplement our meals even when the summer is over.  I’ve never done that before and would love to see how it works out.  But it’s not worth trying to grow in clay soil that hasn’t been amended.

I also need to start saving seeds for the coming season – the autumn is already almost here!  That’s something I’ve never done before, but whatever seeds I can save from my heirlooms will save me the cost of needing to buy those seeds in the spring.

I’m planning to go fruit picking with the kids this week, pears and maybe figs, if the person I was in touch with a month ago still has them (they were unripe when we went).  Naturally, whatever we pick will end up in large part being eaten fresh this week!

Avivah

Free plants for the garden

frugal strategies, gardening

At the end of last week, I called someone who was offering gardening supplies for free on CL.  After a short conversation, we both agreed that none of what she had was what I needed.  Then she mentioned she had a lot of perennials that I was welcome to since she’s moving away, and told me to call her back in the beginning of this week when things quieted down.  So I did!

Today I went over with a couple of the kids, and we got a bunch of nice plants -free -to add to the garden.  The woman herself was so nice – you could tell she loves gardening and said she was glad to give her plants to people who would enjoy them. We got a lot of strawberry plants – we got home when it was dark so we haven’t transplanted them yet.  Anyway, I’ll count how many we have when we transplant them, but it’s a lot.  I also got lemon balm (smells amazing! and also good for tea), mint (I think it’s spearmint, but not sure – my mint in a pot is alive but hasn’t thrived this year – also good for tea and upset stomachs), St. John’s wort (chosen because I prefer plants that are dual purpose, and this is medicinal), and bee balm (I don’t know if it has a medicinal value or not, but it attracts bees and butterflies, which are beneficial to the garden).  There were many other plants I could have taken but I’m not interested in flowers that only look pretty.

In addition to that, I got a nice sized agave cactus/aloe plant, a few pots of columbine, and a huge amount of scarlet cockscomb.  I got these just because they were so pretty and thought they’d look nice in the yard, and put them in front of the front porch.  We had three blueberry bushes there, but I had ds10 move them to a different part of the yard a  week and a half ago (the area I’ve named ‘the orchard’ because of my plans for it – a little presumptuous for a small side yard, but the kids like the sound of it! :)).  I was planning to make a small raised garden bed in front and fill it with ornamental edible greens, but the space is now taken by ornamental non edible cockscomb instead.  I planted most of the cockscomb after I got home, thinking that it was easier to plant them in the coolness of the evening than do it in the heat tomorrow.  It was a lot of work, and they’re such beautiful plants -I hope they’ll transplant successfully. 

But I still have everything else to plant tomorrow morning!  When we took apart the platform deck to replace it with a brick patio, I saved the wood.  When we built that deck, I got all of the supporting boards free from someone who had taken his deck apart, and we used a high quality plywood for the top.  With the boards, we’ve so far built three new raised beds (each 9′ x 3′ 2″), and hopefully will make a fourth in the next day or two (I need to buy just one more board – I have one the right length, but it’s a little narrower than the others and I’d like them all to be identical and uniform).  I have more plans for repurposing the plywood – any guesses?? 🙂  But we have to finish this patio/garden work before starting another project.  Those four beds are going in my backyard, right where the mountain of dirt from digging the patio is, near where my first raised beds were built last summer. It’s fun to keep finding more and more way to fit more in – my ds16 was commenting that it seems strange, but even though our yard has so much more in it, it feels bigger now. 

It’s been a lot of work to fill the new raised beds with that dirt, since the mountain was in the way of being able to put the empty boxes in.  But three raised beds are full now.  I was planning to get composted manure to add to the soil in the new beds to boost the soil strength, but the person I got some from a few months ago said the new batch isn’t yet composted and to call him back in a month.  Of course I could go buy compost but that’s not going to happen. 🙂  We compost all of our kitchen scraps, sometimes putting them in the compost tumbler, but in the summer, we’ve been keeping it very simple.  We either bury it deep in an empty part of a raised bed or pile it on top of the area surrounding the garden plants.  In the latter case, what I did was cover the soil with a flattened cardboard box to act as a mulch, put the scraps on top, and take a couple of shovels of dirt from the mountain to cover it.  That’s pretty much my daily way to do it now that the weather is so warm.  I’m hoping that once we fill all the new raised beds, we can add the rest of the dirt to the soil of the lasagna beds in back.  Right now it’s a little challenging since the plants are in the way, though.  Once we can do that, they’ll be higher, more like raised beds, and we won’t have to make yet another trip to the dump to get rid of all the dirt!

Avivah

Rain barrels

frugal strategies, gardening

About a month ago I bought our first rain barrel for $50 from someone who had only used it twice, a heavy duty vinyl model that holds 100 gallons of water.  (A rain barrel, in case any one isn’t familiar with the term, is a large barrel that is set up to harvest the rain water runoff from your home’s gutters.) I got it with the intent to be more self sufficient with garden’s water needs.  It’s a shame to pay to water the garden when I can use the rain that falls for free!  This model collapses and can be stored compactly in the winter months, which I liked.  It’s also easily accessible to my darling toddler sons, one of whom turned it on this morning without us seeing him, and totally drained out all 100 gallons of water.  yikes2.gif  At least it wasn’t water we had to pay for. 

A couple of weeks ago, I bought three more rain barrels, this time the standard 55 gallon size.  They’re recycled drums made of heavy duty plastic, much better for a family with active kids since they wouldn’t be easily damaged.  I think I’ll resell the vinyl rain barrel before one of my children figures out how to make a hole in it. 🙂   I bought them from someone who made them himself.  They were $50 each but I asked for a discount since I was getting three, so I paid $125 for all of them.  I researched how to make rain barrels quite a while ago because I wanted to make one, so I know it’s not a hard thing to do.  But while theoretically we could have made some ourselves, I knew that there was no way that the barrels would get done in a timely way because we had just started the patio project.  I also knew (since I’ve been looking for months for cheap barrels to make my own rain barrels and every single time the $10 ones were sold before I could get them) that I’d have to pay $25 for the barrel, and after buying the parts, I’d hardly come out more cheaply than buying them ready made.  My time and labor is worth the $5 or less I would have saved, don’t you think?

I’d like to connect at least two of them, so when one is full the water is automatically diverted into the next one.  My ds10 connected a garden hose to the spigot at the bottom of it so we can water directly from the barrel, but it seems that hose has a blockage so I have to attach a different hose. 

We got a little rain last week and it filled a six of one barrel.  Then we got a good rain, and it was incredible to watch how quickly the barrel filled up!  Since we don’t yet have the barrels connected to receive the overflow, we manually redirected the flexible downspout over the empty barrel.  It’s amazing to note the difference between that one, which is receiving the directed run off from the gutter, and the one next to it, that only collected the rain that fell directly.  The one that wasn’t hooked up got only a few cups of water in it after a good sized rain, while we easily could have filled all three barrels in the same amount of time. 

It might not seem so frugal to buy rain barrels, since we pay about $160 every three months for our total water usage, and it will take a lot of collected water until we break even.  But that’s how a lot of money saving things are – you have to make the initial investment and it can take some time until you start to see the payoff.   If you look at the short term, it seems like a waste of money, but I look at it as a long term investment; since watering the garden would take a lot of water on a regular basis (and it’s something I plan to have each summer), I’m happy to have a way to cut the costs. 

Avivah

Strawberry plants

gardening

Well, we’ve gotten probably 15 – 25 strawberries from our 25 strawberry plants this year, and the strawberry season has come to an end!  Looked at from the perspective of just this season, the plants weren’t a very frugal purchase.  However, I planted them with the long term in mind, and hope that these plants will produce for us for years to come!  (And my two littles enjoyed picking them and popping them right into their mouths!)

Strawberry plants send out long spidery looking tentacles that are called runners.  To expand your strawberry patch for free, it’s easy to replant these and they will grow into new plants.  You take the stem part of the runner, and halfway along the runner cover it with soil (if there’s room in your garden bed you can do this near the mother plant, if not, you can put it in a small potting container).  After about a week, the plant will have established itself and then you cut the runner that attaches it to the mother plant.  Voila – a new plant!

Since this is the first year I’ve had these plants, I chose to cut off the runners off most of the plants.  The reason for this is then the plant will use it’s energy to make more berries in the year to come, instead of spreading it’s growing energy more thinly along new plants. Next year when they are better established, I’ll plant all the runners to make new plants; this year I only did it with a few. 

Avivah

Getting free bricks for patio

frugal strategies, gardening, homeschooling

It’s not unusual for me to be tired at the end of the day, but for all of my kids to be so worn out they can hardly walk, is!  Since my six week old baby has been crying for over 5 hours, periodically stopping long enough to fall asleep for several minutes before waking up to cry again, I’m not feeling like sharing any meaningful thoughts 🙂 (he’s in the wrap while I write), so I’ll share what we’ve been doing today to wear us all out.

Today we lucked into a large number of free bricks from someone who took down a brick wall.  It’s amazing how many bricks it takes to make a patio the size we want (about 350 sf)- we hauled one load, got home and realized we needed more.  We took out the second bench seat of the van, so we’d have room to bring even more bricks home with us.  We now have over 1000 very large bricks (not the standard size) – there’s now a huge pile in my yard –  and ds16 has informed me after doing the math that we need another 700.  Do you have any idea how many bricks this is, and how much work it is?   You’d probably have to spend an hour loading bricks to appreciate how much energy is involved. 🙂

The downside of the free bricks is that many of them have mortar on them that will have to be chipped off, but it’s pretty soft.  So while it’s a big job because of the number of bricks, it’s not laborious like chipping off hard cement.  While making a patio isn’t complicated, there are a several aspects to the job and it’s been hard to decide where to start first (dh doesn’t think it’s hard to decide – he’s very clear that I shouldn’t do it at all!).

I need to take apart the platform deck since it’s covering the area where the patio will be. But because the chain link fencing that has yet to be put up is taking up all the extra space in the garage, I don’t have anywhere to keep the deck boards we remove.  (I have a neighbor directly across the alley who is hyper vigilant about piles of wood and calls the zoning/environmental office to report people which results in fines, or I’d leave it neatly stacked against the back part of the yard for a couple of weeks.)  Without digging, there’s nowhere to put the gravel, and eventually, the bricks.

You might now be thinking, didn’t I say that I brought home gravel yesterday and bricks today?  Yes, and I’d have liked to have prepared the ground before bringing anything home, but didn’t know how long it would take until I found the supplies I wanted for free and didn’t want to dig up my yard and leave an ugly hole for an openended period of time.  I’m doing everything opposite how I think it would be most efficient to do it, but that’s the reality of working within the time frame of when the free supplies you want to get actualize.

I’m amazed by what hard workers my kids are – loading and then unloading the bricks is a hugely exhausting job.  But they just keep going and going and going, without complaining even a tiny bit.  They’ve actually been enjoying all of this work, and told me a few times we should do this kind of thing every day!  But that was before they finally ran down tonight, and were all happy to drag themselves into bed.

I was also really tired, so dinner was watermelon served in the back yard.  The littles played in their wading pool in the new swim suits that arrived today, and then ran over to the pea plants and helped themselves to fresh organic snow peas and garden peas.  Some of the older kids have complained about this practice, saying that the littles are snacking away our harvest. But I’m happy to have it and it’s a pleasure to watch them happily picking them.

Tomorrow afternoon dh wants to take the van to the mechanic for a check up and oil change, so whatever bricks or gravel I want to get will have to be gotten in the early afternoon. I need to summon up some enough energy to get more bricks, since I won’t be able to match them with what’s being sold at Home Depot if I need more, and if I don’t get these, then the patio will be smaller than planned.  Hopefully tonight I’ll get to bed before midnight so I have the necessary enthusiasm when I wake up! 🙂

Avivah

Natural weed killer

frugal strategies, gardening

I’ve gotten weary of pulling the same weeds, over and over – it’s the morning glory vines that climb my fence that I’m just fed up with.  No matter how many I pull out, it seems like they reproduce overnight and I have this sense that I’m never going to eradicate them just by pulling them.

So today I decided on a new strategy – to use weed killer!  I don’t use any kind of chemicals in my yard, but figured there had to be a natural solution, and found this suggested on a gardening forum:

Natural Weed Killer

  • 1 gallon white vinegar
  • 1 lb. table salt
  • 1/2 t. dish soap

Heat the vinegar and dissolve the salt.  Add 1/2 t. dishsoap (the soap is to help the solution adhere to the plants).  Put it all in a spray bottle, and spray the plants you want to get rid of.  Be very careful not to get any of it on plants you want to keep!

This is very affordable – about $2 total, and makes over a gallon of weed killer.  I can’t yet say how this has worked for us long term, but many gardeners said it was very effective.  Ds sprayed a lot of our weeds along the fence, and the poison ivy wilted immediately.  I’m looking forward to seeing all the weeds disappear!

Avivah

Carpet for the garden

frugal strategies, gardening

I mentioned that I got some used carpeting a few weeks ago for the garden, right?   But I didn’t have enough for what I wanted it for.  So I put a ‘wanted’ ad on Craig’s List, and someone emailed me to say they had some carpet they had just pulled up that I was welcome to.

Yesterday I went with ds10 and dd12 to pick it up.  The couple I got it from was curious what I would do with it, and when I told them it was for my garden, we got to discussing gardening.  (They want me to email them when I make jam and sell them some – I don’t think that I’ll do that, though.)  And then they offered to give us a tour of their garden, something they said they never did before except for friends.  They had a beautiful bamboo garden and it was really lovely.  There were six kinds of bamboo (it never occurred to me that there was even more than one kind of bamboo) with lots of other plants – he told us about each one as we walked through (call that science for the afternoon).   (And on the way home, we listened to an audio recording of Sign of the Beaver – history for the day.)

I found it especially interesting since he had a yard that was almost entirely grass free, something I’ve been wondering how to do.  It was very tastefully designed – they did all the work themselves on it – and it was amazing to me how they created a feeling of expansiveness and privacy on such a small lot.  However, nothing was edible, and my goal in planting is to use my ground space for growing food.  It’s more challenging to landscape with edibles.  I’m not giving up, though – I have to be patient and accept that a beautiful garden takes time, particularly when done the frugal way.  For now, I have to be satisfied with having a productive garden, because honestly it’s not very beautiful (and with the mower recently having broken, my grass is quickly getting shaggy – it isn’t adding anything charming to the look of things).  

What did I want the carpet for?  Two things.  The first was to use to create paths between the lasagna beds; particularly with little children, I wanted to clearly define the space where they should walk so they don’t trample the plants. But more than that, I don’t have the desire to constantly be weeding the pathways – it’s bad enough to have to weed the actual garden beds.  This eliminated the expense of mulching the paths.  The second thing I wanted them for was to use as a mulch layer for some of my plants, cutting out a hole where the plant could grow from.  But my kids dissuaded me from doing this with our raspberry and blackberry bushes, saying that it would keep the shoots from being able to spread.  I had to agree with their logic, so the carpet is now just on the paths. 

A couple of the kids used a razor blade kind of knife to cut the carpet into the size strips I needed, but the blade disappeared before they could cut the final piece.  When I went inside I discovered what happened to it.  Ds3 apparently found it, figured out how to unlock it, and slashed the kitchen screen while we were busy with the yard work.  Sigh.  This is part of why there’s always something to fix around here.  🙂 

Avivah