Here I go again already thinking about next springs garden. But I've recently found ways to garden next year more cost effectively. Some of these ideas you may want to start getting prepared for now, so you can garden for next to nothing next year.

You can grow seeds outdoors in the winter and your don't need a greenhouse! Bat will just love this one because I've been wanting a greenhouse forever. How is it done?

Well, you can sow seeds into mini greenhouses made from recyclables and after they are sown, you place them outside till the end of winter. As the weather warms the seeds start to germinate. You can find out more by going to the Winter Sown website. I'm starting to save my recyclables now.

How about a Seed Exchange- where you can try new plants without spending too much (you will have to pay for postage). Well I thought about doing one here and I had the website up and ready until I found out that there are many good ones already going. There's a seed exchange at the Backyard Gardener Seed Exchange, The Garden Web seed exchange and the Blossom Swap Seed Exchange plus many more listed on the Internet.

Did you have too many hostas, lilies, or say black-eyed susan's this past summer. Well, get ready this spring there always seems to be a local perennial exchange. My library holds one every year and I've always thought about going and this year I will do it. I already know which plants I want to exchange -the black-eyed susan's have just took over my flower garden this year and I know someone will want some. If your community doesn't have a perennial exchange maybe you can exchange with friends or neighbors.

Then the ultimate way to garden for next to nothing is to save your seeds. You'll be able to grow wonderful pumpkins, heirloom beans, and tomatoes all from the seeds you saved this year. You just can't get any cheaper than that!

Maybe I can exchange some of my cinderalla pumpkin seeds later.

This past summer has been my first year growing a herb garden and I've dried a lot of herbs. Without more knowledge though, of what to do with them, I fear a lot would have gone to waste. So when a community education class came up called, a Spice of Life, I couldn't wait to go. The class has been taught by a very knowledgeable lady from our county's herb society.

I thought you might want to know some of the things I have learned about herbs.

Did you know?

• Herbs only have a shelf life of one year. After that the flavor is just not as good. Some in our class confessed that they needed to take a trip to the compost bin.
• Freezing your herbs is better than drying them: If you have the freezer space, freeze your herbs because it's easier to do and you can use them the same as fresh.
• You should add your herbs the last 20-30 minutes of cooking because they lose their flavor with longer cooking. I am definitely guilty of this one.
• Wrapped in wet paper towel, fresh herbs will last in the refrigerator about a week.

The instructor passed around many herbs for us to look at that I never thought about growing, but will next year. The lemon thyme had just an unbelievable lemon smell. You can use it in place of lemons in any recipe. Another one I would love to try would be winter savory. My herb garden is not that big so I'm really not sure how I will get another herb plant in there but I'll give it a try. 

Some more good hints:

• After you strip the dried leaves off the stems don't throw them away, make them into fire starters. Just tie them in a bundle with raffia and keep in a basket by the fireplace. I'm sure the smell it produces will be wonderful. It kind of upsets me that I didn't think of this about two months ago.
• Make an herbal wreath. Take a grapevine wreath and put fresh sage all around it. You can hang it in your kitchen and when the steam from cooking warms it up the aroma flows through the kitchen. I hope it's not raining tomorrow because I know there have to be more grape vines that need to be taken down in my neighbor's yard and I have plenty of sage.

The instructor brought in rosemary sugar cookies (I loved them) and lavender sugar cookies (they were OK).

Not everything was about cooking there were some great things you could do with herbs for you and your home. Here are some great recipes:

Lavender Bubble Bath

1 bunch of Lavender
Cean wide-necked jar with screw top (can be canning jar, pickle jar, peanut butter jar)
1 large bottle of clear shampoo (you can use cheap shampoo just has to be clear)
5 drops of Lavender oil

Mix and place jar in a sunny window for 2-3 weeks, then strain the liquid and re-bottle. (I'll be going to our Farmer's Market tomorrow to get the oil – it needs to be 100 percent pure essential oil)

Linen Spray

1/4 cup vodka (buy the cheapest)
8 drops of lavender or Bergamot oil
2 cups of distilled water

Let sit for a week in a sunny window. Place in empty spray bottles and spray on your linens, carpet, etc. We made this last night I can't wait till next week to spray it on my linens.

Headache Pillow

Headaches that are caused from stress or sinus problems can be relieved by making a headache pillow.

You can make a small pillow or make one that you wrap around your neck from cloth and fill it with one of the following mixtures:

For a calming effect: Lavender and rice or buckwheat
To help open your sinuses: Rosemary and rice or buckwheat

Put in the microwave for about 1 to 1 1/2 minutes then place on your forehead or around your neck.

I have been having a lot of sinus headaches (probably due to the amount of rain we are having here), so I came home and made a neck wrap in a matter of ten minutes and it works really well.

She had a lovely idea of making these all up and putting them in baskets and giving them as gifts for Christmas. Now there is an idea.

You can visit my garden at Gardening in Lower MI.

Gardening season is over in Michigan – all the produce is out of the vegetable garden and herb garden is winding down. Which is good because, October first greeted us with our first hard frost. It's kind of a let down this transition from working at break neck speed in the garden, to a slower time of year. Oh I love fall, with its beautiful leaves and cooler weather, but it hit me a little more this year, what's a gardner to do when winter sets in?

One morning I was up early trying to fix my sewing machine (without much success), when I noticed how quiet everything was and wondered when time birds wake up. Then it dawned on me, birds! Why not watch and take pictures of birds that come to my backyard.

I found through research one way to attract more birds to your backyard it to make it into a backyard wildlife refuge. The National Wildlife Federation offers a list of requirements in order to be recognized as a certified backyard refuge. I already had many things that were listed and the ones I lack are inexpensive to obtain.

The lists includes:

• What food you have for the birds or wildlife? It can be a mixture of natural vegetation or feeders
• Water supply – including ponds, lakes, birdbaths etc.
• Cover for wildlife – like shrubs, brush piles
• A place for wildlife to raise their young – like nesting boxes, plants that moths or butterfly's can lay their eggs in. etc.
• Let your garden grow green – by going green you can conserve natural resources and by planting native plants you stop using as much fertilizer.

I do have a bird house – I see evidence that birds have used it, but they haven't stayed too long. I think it sits too close to the house (the other side of the post has our house number) and they probably don't like the activity. So I'll be looking for more birdhouses in the future.

We already have many trees with fruit and bushes for wildlife to find shelter, but I think it would be neat to have a butterfly bush, so I'll be staking out a place in our backyard to plant one next spring.

One more inexpensive easy way to provide shelter is a brush pile – maybe in the far corner of our backyard there is room. I'll get started tomorrow with leftover grape vines. Hope Bat won't mind too much.

It hasn't been easy waiting on the return of the birds – everyday I think, this will be the day. The day the birds come back to the feeder, the day I finally get my first picture, and the day I hopefully identify it correctly. Well, I did get a beautiful picture one day of ... an empty bush – birds do fly fast you now.

Some other lessons I've learned are:

1. Cleaning and putting fresh quality seed in the feeder is essential.

2. Flip-flops are not a good thing to wear while sneaking up on birds. They hear every sound around them.

3. In order to get a picture of a bird you need to go outside – and do something or else you'll never see a bird. Suggestions for something to do, well, fill up a bird feeder, put more water in their bowl, or plant 100 tulip bulbs (sorry the gardener in me always emerges).

4. When you go outside – DON'T forget the camera. I know I had to have created quite a scene the other day, running back in the house for my camera. Now, it hangs around my wrist or in my pocket.

Yesterday I did go out and buy suet and a holder to put it in. I found a website with a easy to make suet recipe at Organic Garden Buzz, so next time I need to replace the suet it will be homemade.

If you're also interested in making your backyard a wildlife refuge, most of these things are easy and inexpensive to obtain to get your on your way.

Success! Here's my first blurry picture of a Black-capped Chickadee:

Composting is one the best things you can do for your garden and the environment. All those kitchen scraps and leaves are no longer going in to the trash but will now decompose to form in to a nice rich soil and you get to add that to your garden. One complete cycle.

As to what to put in a compost bin, I never thought beyond kitchen waste until our dryer needed work and we found it was completely stopped up with lint (I usually hang clothes on the line, but the dryer does come in handy). After researching, I found you can compost dryer lint. I would have never thought of composting lint or say your vacuum cleaner bag contents. These are just a couple of the 163 things that are listed on Marion Owen's list of "163 Things You Can Compost." Some of which I just don't want to think about but others I'll try to remember.

I have two compost bins now: one of which I have been adding to and the other I'm leaving alone to make compost. There are different ways to compost, in a bin like mine – it is the easiest – you never have to turn it, but it takes from 6 months to 2 years to make compost. Then there are the turning bins which take about 3 to 6 months to make compost. Last but not least, you could just make a pile of compost. It's not as neat, but it's not as expensive.

With the amount of vegetable peelings, grapes, weeds that don't have seeds, newspaper and everything else I've been throwing in the compost this summer, I've managed to fill the two bins I have to the top. So, to make more room, I opened up the bottom of one of the bins that had been composting since last spring and was able to get almost a bushel full of rich, dark compost. Well, actually that little door at the bottom of the bin is just not big enough, so I just pushed the whole thing over, much easier.

After taking out the compost it gave me more room to continue adding grapes, tomato peelings, etc.

It was a real lesson for the youngest daughter.She had never watched me get finished compost before; she thought that they were just two big garbage bins back there.

She was almost right, but you need to have a combination of food waste (no meat or grease) and brown waste (such as leaves), so it will start to decompose over time in to a rich soil.

One day this past summer, as I was weeding the garden, and throwing weeds in the compost bin, I started thinking about things you shouldn't compost. Kind of scared me, I wasn't sure if weeds were on Marion Olson's list but after much research – I found out yes I can compost weeds, but not if they are full of seeds. That way next year, they don't return after you spread the compost in your garden.

Thank goodness mine didn't have seeds – with the rain we had been getting, if you don't pick them up off the soil, they just dig down in and sprout up again tomorrow!

Then I continued researching and found a lot of things people may think about composting but shouldn't:

• dog waste or cat litter
• bones
• meat
• weeds that are full of seeds
• wood
• diseased plants
• human waste (yep some people do this)
• BBQ charcoal
• diary products
• metal
• glass
• plastic
• grease
• rice
• walnuts
• grease
• mayonnaise
• salad dressing
• peanut butter
• citrus peels (too acidic)
• baby diapers

Many of these things can cause your compost to have odor and attract wild life or will harbor disease.

For city dwellers I have found one more way to compost – in a trash can (also very economical). For detailed instructions you can visit The Slow Cook "Trash Can Composting."

So, composting is something everyone is able to do.

Busy time of year in Michigan for gardening – bringing all the vegetables and putting them up. What ever the means you use to preserve your harvest – drying, canning, or freezing your garden vegetables. It’s time to get it done. The garden has helped so much over the years making our grocery dollar last longer while providing us with healthy vegetables in the winter.

Canning, as a means of preserving, has been around for a long time. As city kids we loved going to Arkansas to visit my grandparents in the country and I remember Grandma’s big vegetable garden. Grandma spent many hours canning all the produce she harvested out of the garden. I remember a story my Mom tells of grandma leaving grandpa in charge of the canner full of peas while she was busy elsewhere. Grandpa forgot about them and the lid blew off leaving grandpa with pea sized burns on over his face and hands. Of course, this was many years ago and since then canners are much more reliable.

So far this year I’ve canned beans, salsa, vegetable soup, strawberry jam, dried shuck beans, and I’ve also dried corn for the first time.

My husband Bat comes from Kentucky, and shuck beans are one of our favorite ways to fix green beans. You can dry shuck beans in a couple of ways – after stringing them and breaking them up you can take needle and thread and go through each bean then hang to dry; or you can try the method we use, which is to spread them out on a sheet and put them in the sun to dry, making sure to bring them in at night so the dew won’t get on them.

You can also dry corn without the use of a dehydrator. After cutting the corn off the cob, spread evenly on a cookie sheet and dry for 12 hours at 150 degrees.

I’m still getting produce out of my garden even though it flooded twice this summer. Yesterday I picked a half bushel of tomatoes, and today I will can quart jars full of vine ripe tomatoes that will be good for chili and soup on a cold Michigan winter’s day.

What my garden has not been able to provide us with we have bought from local farmers. I bought some peaches this last weekend at the peach festival in Romeo, Michigan, and yesterday I bought 50 pounds of unclassified potatoes and a half bushel of yellow delicious apples. Now, what to do with all those apples, there’s … pie filling, applesauce, fried apples…

I was composting corn husks this last week when I realized that I had been putting a lot of green in my compost and no brown. To compost you need 1 part nitrogen which is the brown (this includes pine cones, leaves, and weeds) to 15 to 30 parts carbon which is the green (this includes vegetable peelings, but no meat or grease). Well, we don’t have a pine tree, and thank goodness the leaves are still on the trees. It was then I remembered you could use newspapers. So I shredded up some of my newspapers and got the compost going again.

Then someone told me I could have used the paper bags I get out of the store for the brown in my compost. Well, I realized I didn’t have any paper bags, I always get plastic.

There are three different stores we frequent, depending, of course, on which offers the best deals on groceries that week. There is the store we go to once a month that you bag your own and you get a good deal. When we go there, I make sure I bring my recyclable bags.

The best store we go to I think is the one who just changed to bags that are 100 percent biodegradable. The cashier was a little worried the first time I got them and said they could biodegrade as I went to the car. It didn’t quite happen, but I felt good about it anyway.

Now the other they just stick your groceries in a plastic bag and you’re done. That’s the store we are going to this morning.

You know I always make myself feel better because we reuse the plastic bags so much – one for the trash in the bathroom, and of course the kitty litter and dog waste. So we’re reusing right? There is reduce, reuse, and recycle. Aha ... but oldest daughter informed me, the plastic bags are still floating over farmlands, and causing a lot of pollution.

Then, you have to think of paper bags whose former life was a tree, and the amount of machinery that was used to fell those trees. It takes a lot of natural resources to make a paper bag. Of course they decompose more rapidly than plastic – but at what expense? The debate goes on and on.

So what to do? I’m going to be brave, go to that plastic bag store this morning, with my recyclable bags and hand them to the cashier before she starts shoving the food in the plastic bags. Also, I’m going to leave bags in both cars so that when I have to stop by for just a few things they will be there for me to use. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but, as with every lifestyle change, it will take some getting used to.

My daughter and I entered the county fair again this year, I entered some dried herbs, jam, and photos that I had taken, and she entered some photos and a elephant she had crochet. We were there bright and early before church Sunday morning to hand the entries in to the judges, with the judging starting that afternoon.

We would have loved to go back out to the fair on Monday, because the suspense was killing us, but things kept getting in the way. It was finally Wednesday that we got a chance to get back out to the County Fair and see how we did. Trying to act calm as we went to each table, we found that I had won third place in the dried herb department and my daughter received second place for her crochet work. Not too bad for the first time I’ve dried herbs and her first year of learning how to crochet. We are pretty happy – next year well have fun and do it again, after we take some photography classes.

What’s a fair of course without rides, elephant ears, a crocodile man, and then there are the exhibit barns. The gardening exhibit is real a good one of course, the cows are neat, the minature horses are so cute, oh but the chickens they are the best. I wish I could have chickens here at home but the ordinaces here say no. I guess I have chicken fever cause I look at them all the time and I found the one I would raise if I had the chance. My husband, Bat, just shakes his head.