The best things in life...

...REALLY ARE FREE!  I've been trying to slowly transform our sad little back yard into something out of a magazine (ha! ..yeah right) for a few months.  It looks like there's only about 2 days work done back there, but when you have a VERY limited budget, things just don't happen as fast.  So we had some pretty dry and dead looking grass to start out with, and with a little water, it's green and has perked up.  There was not a shrub or tree anywhere, just grass growing right up to the foundation of the house.  Well, I take that back.  There WAS a tree back there and when we bought the house in December, there were no leaves on it, we thought because it was, well, December.  So when spring came around, still no leaves.  So we had NO shrubs, lots of poor quality grass, and one very dead tree.  Not really a space Anna was too thrilled about playing in.   Daddy cut the dead tree down and I bought a new one.  Once that is about 1/8th the size of the old one...but a tree no less.  I bought some edging, dug the trench and put that in, got some shrubs last week and planted those.  Then I needed some mulch.  I'm not such a big fan of mulch because it tends to float or blow away...even the expensive stuff doesn't stay where you put it normally.  But I needed some to make things look a little better and to cut down on the water usage.  Since I watch too much TV I saw a commercial once on one of those gardening shows about how they got FREE mulch from their local recycling center.  I called and sure enough, FREE mulch.  I went to see what it looked like and asked the best way to load it up.  I went today and took 7 huge storage bins and one big cardboard box and shoveled until they almost overflowed.  Heck, I'm gonna get lots if it's free!  Why not?  So after shoveling mulch into about the 5th bin, my spine felt like it was about to explode out of my back into several thousand pieces and spew spinal fluid all over my cute green shirt.  But, I kept going, filling up every container I had.  I brought it home (took 3 Advil) and spread it all in my new flowerbeds and then had enough left over for the front.  Do you know how much that would've costed me if I went to buy that stuff?  Man.  Free is nice.