1. Save your old seeds (check to see if they still work).
2. Compost for homemade soil – even if your yard is small you can compost. In fact, you can compost indoors if you want.
3. Don’t buy new – garden tools, gardening books, pots, and so on. Most gardening supplies can be easily found at thrift stores. You can also borrow from or share garden tools with friends. It’s also super easy to check out books about gardening from the library.
4. Try some easy DIY landscaping instead of paying someone to do it for you.
5. Always use reusable items and recyclables such as egg cartons for starting seeds or reuse the plastic seed pots you used last year (clean well to avoid disease). You can also make your own growing pots with recycled materials.
6. Be water aware. Build a rain barrel, water at night, only give plants the actual water they need, and so on. Using less water can save you big time.
7. Make homemade weed killer -Mix one ounce orange oil and 1 teaspoon liquid soap with 1 gallon of 10% white vinegar. Shake it up and use it to spot treat weeds.
8. Use the least evasive pest control methods first, which are often much cheaper than advanced pest control supplies.
9. Buy seeds locally from the farmers market or a local farm store. You can often buy just what you need vs. a whole packet. at the local farm store.
10. Swap seeds and plants with neighbors.
11. Plant a garden that will naturally thrive where you live. Plants made for your climate will thrive better with less care than exotic plants.
12. Use what you’ve got such as leaves and newspaper as mulch.

[image via stock.xchng]

Post from: Blisstree

12 ways to garden on the cheap

1. Saving money is always a good thing!
2. Second hand shops, recycle centers (my city has a reuse center) and thrift stores can be great sources for fabric, yarn and craft supplies.
3. It’s better for the environment to find stuff, rather than have to buy new.
4. Keep your eyes open in unlikely spots – you don’t necessarily have to spend $$$ in a craft store to get what you need.
5. It can spark a creative idea to work with new materials.

Just remember, it’s not thrifty to buy stuff you know you’ll never use, just because it’s on a really good sale…

image: Stock.xchg

Post from: Blisstree

5 Reasons To Be A Thrifty Collector

I’ve turned my entire bathroom into a library. The haphazard way of just putting books and magazines on the back of the toilet was driving me crazy. So, I added a magazine rack next to the toilet paper roll holder.

But, the part I love most about my library/restroom is the wallpaper. It’s the pages of a real vintage book. I tore the pages out and modge podged them onto the wall and painted the molding pink.

My grandmother had a pink bathroom and my whole childhood I just loved that room. Since becoming an adult I’ve always painted my various bathrooms pink.

While using the guest bathroom at someones home I was taken with their wallpaper. It was expensive, I’m sure. What I loved about it was that it was all poetry. But, it was poetry about Time. Every poem was in relation to time. Time, and running out of it, I decided, was not going to help me do my business.

I loath most poetry. Say what you have to say. Don’t make me critically deconstruct it to figure it out. But, rhyming poetry is much, much worse. The one poet I truly adore is Dorothy Parker. So I took an original Not So Deep As A Well printed in the 1960s that I already had and glued the pages to the walls. Because the book was over 40 years old it gave the walls a really romantic aged look.

I accented with signs and towel hooks that say things like ”When train is in station, please do not flush” and “Bath 5 cents, Towel 10 cents.” I kept the cameo pink and white cut-outs (honestly I haven’t the slightest idea what they are really called) for art. 

But, alas, my daughter is starting to read and Dorothy Parker is more suicidal, morbid and maudlin than is appropriate for small children.

Razors pain you, drugs cause cramp, acid stains you, rivers are damp, guns aren’t lawful, nooses give, gas smells awful – might as well live.

I thought perhaps the bathroom should be just a tad more optimistic and uplifting. So, I found a Leaves of Gold book, also printed in the ’60s. This time the pages are encouraging thoughts and affermations about life. My favorite is the one about Abraham Lincoln’s resume, which includes a lifetime of failure after failure and then BAM President of the United States. Dig that. I pasted these pages right over the top of the Parker pages.

I adore my bathroom. It’s probably my favorite room in the house. I love words and this bathroom reflects that. It also functions as our library or reading room, so I dig that it reflects that. And it was cheap, the book was $3.50 and the liquid starch I got at the dollar store.

Post from: Blisstree

Library/Restroom Wallpaper