The Garden Shedde

How many of you have received a hand-written letter in the past year? Christmas cards do not count. I thought as much. Not very many of us send or receive hand written letters any more. I can remember when I used to write long convoluted letters on my old word processing program maybe twenty years ago before e-mail was around. That is not even a penned letter that I am talking about now. I am bemoaning the loss of the actual hand-written letter.

I am not a Luddite and wish to suggest that we reject technology nor am I suggesting that we begin spending the time to writing letters that express our thoughts and feelings. Blogs seem to be satisfying that need just fine. What I am suggesting is the immense emotional value that a hand-written thank you note can create in your customers. Talk about creating a bond with the human beings that choose to do business with you. I think that will blow your competition out of the water and help to seal the connection you have with your customer. Happy trails with the pen!

If you haven’t heard of vertical gardening, you will. It seems to be the new rage this year in gardening though it isn’t really anything new. People have been planting vine vegetables up walls, trellises and arbors for many years. They called it survival or planting food wherever you could and if that was by a wall where the plant grew up it; so be it.

It is us who seem to need all these fancy “vertical walls” and “hanging hooks and hammocks” in order to plant vertically. But before you run out and purchase the latest gizmo, look around your house and yard and see what you have that you could try this type of gardening with; a pergola, arbor, trellis, wall, fence, etc. Do a little research to find out what types of plants grow well vertically and try it. It’s great to save space for those things that cannot grow up so you should be able to grow more if part of your garden is dedicated to vertical.

At our house we recently completed a survey sent to us from the power company to access the energy usage and potential savings we can have with some small and some large changes. I was very surprised at what they asked as it was more in-depth than I thought it would be. I had to go look at the frig and hot water heater to find out what the ratings were and how old they were. Unfortunately, there were a couple of things I was not able to do because of the weather but I felt I came close to getting it right.

It took about a month to get the results back and we have found them both informative as well as mostly doable. It broke the changes down into cost and let you know how many months it would take to recoup your investment, which helps you access what you should or could do. If you get the opportunity to do something like this I would highly recommend it because you learn what you have done right and what you can improve and; you save money!

Like many, I got some much wanted Christmas presents that now that I have them, I don’t really know what to do with them! The dehydrator is one such gift this year. It’s not that I have not had some success with it, it’s the fact that it takes so much time to cut stuff up, dry it and then you have to eat it pretty soon before it spoils because you’re not using preservatives, which is the reason you get a dehydrator.

Once you look at it you think that’s cool, I’ll be able to do quite a bit at a time but the reality is you need a lot of rows of racks to do any amount of drying at one time and they cost a pretty penny. In fact, at close to twenty bucks per set, after you buy five sets you could have bought another dehydrator. So after you realize that’s how they make their money, you have to decide if the time and effort is worth the overall cost (I find that with most things these days you have to count the costs) and for me that’s still up in the air.