Planning for Spring with Seasonal Bargains

In the past few weeks while out on errands we have run across some really great bargains in the garden department at Lowe's. They marked down a lot of different plants that they don't want to keep through winter. And we were some of the fortunate recipients! Tramp 1 has great plans for the garden next year and he picked up some really good buys on grape and blackberry plants. For the landscaping we plan to design over the winter, we got boxwood, barberry, euonymous, varigated english holly, vinca, and colorado blue spruce. We also got some flowering kale and winter pansies that we can be enjoying right now. Now the big trick is to get the rest of them all tucked away before the cold hits hard here. We plan to put them in a sheltered area in the side yard next to the house where they have a south and west exposure and will get warmed up a bit each day. We will mulch them heavily with barkdust and most importantly, remember to water them in the winter. There are so many plants that people think they can't grow here - and they can't! - simply because they do not water them in the winter. The extreme dry and cold just sucks the life out of plants and they need help sometimes when they are not native to our area. For our efforts, we get more plants for less $$ - and on snowy weekends we can work out a plan for our landscaping and be ready come spring planting time.

Another great bargain we got was a pond. It is the hard black plastic kind. It was the display model they were breaking down and had marked way more than half off. It came complete with two waterfalls, piping, a spitting turtle and a pump. They also threw in the mulch they had buried it in for the display. We got it all for less than the price of a new pump and this pump was close to new as they had replaced it just a month prior. They even bagged up all the mulch for us - a reddish wood mulch - and it ended up filling 19 bags! (We are going to spread it out front for the winter - it will be a very nice change to the dirt yard we currently have.) And they loaded it all in our truck, too! We also were able to get a super discount on culled lumber while there. We got a large load of various dimensional lumber including a lot of pressure treated cuts that are just what we need to build raised beds in our garden. They loaded that for us, too, but it took a second trip to town as the truck was full!