Girls and Green Things: Money and Weeds

     The economy has affected our family as well. After about 17 years of working almost every summer, Tim is "unemployed" at the moment. Add in furlough days at the end of June, and we've made some adjustments to our budget. The first thing to be eliminated was the girls' allowances. All of them were pretty understanding, but broke. Elena and Camille have gotten some babysitting jobs that have paid for a fancy movie premier, "Eclipse," but are otherwise needing some green backs for other "frills" purchases (translation: clothes shopping at the mall.)

 So, as I looked around at all the yard projects I had to do, I hired them to help me with weeding my butterfly and hummingbird habitat garden and putting weed cloth down. The total hours spent with both of them working has been about 4. So, I paid them each $4 an hour. I already had the weed block covering, so my only expense was their labor and 16 bags of bark chips at $3.88 each and 2 boxes of fabric pins to secure the weed block down at $12 each. So, the total cost of the project was just over $100 and two  happy girls that are a little greener in the wallet and the thumb. I'm ecstatic because I've just eliminated hours of back breaking weeding. Plus, in addition to water saving mulch for my plants, I've created a much nicer looking habitat for my butterflies, hummingbirds and humans to enjoy gazing upon.

At the beginning of the project...

At the end of the project