This year you spent $50 on flowers for the front flower bed.  No matter what kind of bush or plant you put in that flower bed every year, THEY ALL DIE!  Remember the mum your brother-in-law got you?  This looks like Morticia Addams garden!

This is hell’s waiting room.  These plants know where they are going so they don’t even try.  Build a porch over this flower bed and forget it!

You spent $20 on tomato plants that grew into beautiful large plants.  You were so hopeful…   and then the leaves toward the bottom started turning yellow and dying.  Some leaves were covered with strange white specs.  The few tomatoes the plants managed to produce had soft spots on them and didn’t smell right when they were cut open.  Some were dry on the inside and had weird cores with black specs in them 😕

You spent $30 on tomato cages that didn’t even begin to support the full-grown plants.  Branches were falling over the top of the cage and breaking from the weight.

In an attempt to keep up with all the necessary weeding, you threw your back out and messed up your Bix 7 Race training.  You spent another $20 on weed screen and mulch so you wouldn’t have to weed anymore but the grass grew up through the weed screen anyway.  Ground squirrels ate all the cherry tomatoes before you could pick them and what the squirrels didn’t get the hornworms did.  You ended up pulling the rotting plants out of the ground at the beginning of September without ever getting a decent tomato.  🙁

Cross tomato plants off the garden list for next year and shop your local farmer’s markets instead.

You spent $40 on flowers and $10 for potting soil to go in the flower pots that sit on the patio.  You lugged heavy bags of soil from the trunk of the car to the patio.  You spent all that time planting flowers in pots and dragging your garden hose around the yard in the extreme heat every night to water them, and despite all your hard work they were severely dried out and dying by mid-July.   No flower pots next year!  No lugging heavy bags of soil or garden hoses.

You spent no money, no watering, and no effort, on the glorious petunias that voluntarily pop up in that huge crack on the patio every year.  This year, they even spread to the dirt patch beside the patio and went nuts producing hundreds of petunias!

They grew like gangbusters even after getting stepped on, having the hose drug over them, the grill rolled over them, and the dog peeing on them!  You even had enough seedlings to transplant into all of the square openings on the cinder block herb garden.

The low cost, low maintenance herb garden that produces tons of delicious herbs to use all Spring, Summer, and Fall, I might add!

Made even more beautiful now with free crack-petunias!  So, next year spend less money on plants and more time on your old, cracked-up patio, drinking wine and enjoying your free petunias!