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If you don't have any perennials in your garden, you need to get some. Now! Evergreens, grass and annuals may be neat and tidy, but they are also quite boring. They look the same day in, and day out. I grew up hating what I thought of as yard work, and it wasn't until Annamarie moved in next door to us that I discovered the difference between yard work and gardening. Now, that Annamarie was quite the character, and her garden was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was full of native plants, herbs and perennials. It seemed as if every time I stepped out of the door, she was calling out "Becky! You have got to come over here and see this!" or smell this, or taste this... Before long, I was hooked. Next thing you know, I'm wearing Birkenstocks, have three compost bins going in the back yard, and have gone back to school to study horticulture. Now I can't resist a daily stroll to check on "everyone" in the garden, just to see what they've been up to since I saw them last, and I almost hate to leave town, for fear of missing something. If you have perennials in your garden, there is always something interesting going on!

If you are new to gardening, and not in a big hurry, here is an easy method of creating a flower bed. Begin by marking off the area where the new bed will go, either with stakes or with some of that day-glo grass paint. Next, spread a thick layer of newspaper, or a single layer of corrugated cardboard, on top of the grass in the entire area, overlapping edges slightly. If it's windy, weight the paper with rocks to keep it from blowing away. Use only plain newspaper pages, nothing glossy. Dampen the paper lightly with the hose sprayer, then spread it with a three-inch layer of municipal or homemade compost, if you can get it. If not, use a blend of half topsoil and half composted manure. Now comes the hard part. Just sit back and wait-for five or six months. As the newspaper decomposes, it smothers the grass and weeds below, and you end up with a nice bed full of earthworms, without doing a bunch of back-breaking digging. If you start in fall, your bed will be ready for planting by spring, and vice versa. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I've done it at several houses now, and it worked quite well.

Because I didn't turn into "Mother Earth" (as my siblings now call me) until I was in my forties, all the horrible mistakes I made in the early days, and all the money I wasted, are still fairly fresh in my memory. Here is what I learned,

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