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As soon as the first warm, sunny spring day arrives, hordes of people, feeling the gardener within, make their yearly pilgrimage to the garden center. Anyone watching the exodus from the store will think the end of the world is coming. Customers leave with baskets overflowing of every type of product imaginable. Here are some suggestions to help you be a smarter buyer at the garden center.

The first thing you need to do is to learn how to ignore all those beautiful flowers that greet you as you walk in. The retailers have put them there on purpose. They get you thinking about gardening again, and they will almost certainly get you to buy some. Resist the temptation, and don't buy them yet. Most of the flowers you have seen have been grown indoors in a greenhouse. Throughout most of the United States, the time to put those beautiful flowers out is many weeks away. The rule of thumb is simple; don't put any annual plants until after the date of the last frost. Although this date varies with latitude, generally putting anything out before May 15 is going to cost you money and heartache. Of course the garden city is counting on frost, lots of it. With each wave of frost, your plants die, and you need to make another trip to buy some more plants.

There is probably no bigger garden item than lawn products. The major lawn supply companies realized many years ago, that the best way for them to make money is put the idea into people's minds that lawn maintenance is best done on a four step program. Weed and feed that lawn in the spring, early summer, later summer and early fall. This calendar mentality is going to cost you dearly and makes no sense at all. A well maintained and healthy lawn does not grow on a schedule. You only need to apply things when they are called for. Switching to an organic approach will save you the most money, and result in the healthiest lawn. Here are some lawn tips:

FERTILIZER: Stay away from chemical fertilizers. The make your lawn turn green very fast, and thus you are tricked into thinking that they are good product. They are highly water soluble, and in fact 80% of the fertilizer is leached down away from the grass. This is the reason why they need to be reapplied so often. Switch to an organic fertilizer. They are composed of natural materials that must be broken down by soil microorganisms before they are available to the grass. This is why your lawn takes longer to green, but will stay green much longer. It may seem you are spending

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