Ack! The apex of the holiday season is approaching fast! What would last-minute gift buyers do without Amazon’s 2-day shipping? My guess is show up shame-facedly at holiday gatherings where grab bags and white elephant games constitute the evening’s entertainment. When you know who you’re buying for, it makes sense to spend a little cash on holiday gifts, but when you’re anonymously wrapped package is going in a sack and may just end up in the hands of that guy from accounting who you cannot stand, why pay more than twenty bucks?

Here are six holiday gifts that won’t set you back more than two ten-spots.

As usual, click on the pics for more info. Remember, all is not lost. There is still time to buy holiday gifts for all the people on your list (loved and hated alike) without succumbing to the press of the crowd and the overwhelming atmosphere of the mega-mall.

Selling foreclosures has to be a pain. When The Beard and I were looking at houses, we saw a few foreclosures and all of them had been trashed. I’m not saying that every foreclosed homes everywhere has been given a nasty once over, but I will put forth that houses that sit empty long enough begin to look…well, empty. A house with a rock “lawn” or lots of shrubs may not lose all that much curb appear for lack of care, but lawns can drop dead pretty darned quickly.

Some banks trying to sell empty homes are apparently taking the easy way out when it comes to lawn care. Companies like the Greener Grass Company in California and Tate Turf Painting in South Carolina will paint a lawn green for about $200. The benefits, according to Tate, are multifold:

• Have a green lawn in hours, not weeks or months
• Less expensive than the overall costs of over seeding
• Environmentally safe, no harmful chemicals in our paint
• Lasts up to 3 months
• Protects the lawn from harsh winter temperatures
• No mowing during the winter
• No Spring Transition Period
• Prepares grass to “green up” on its own faster in Spring
• CONSISTENT GREEN THROUGHOUT ENTIRE LAWN!

Apparently, it won’t harm the individual blades of grass or the root system, and the paint itself is applies in such a way that sunlight can still reach each blade. It seems odd, but at the same time, is intriguing. A quarter of my lawn recently died mysteriously, and we’re not quite sure what to do about it.

Like I said over at Manolo for the Brides, this is going to be a light week where posting is concerned because I’m nowhere near a computer. Thank you, timestamp editor! Anyway, now that it’s getting colder (in MA and WA both) my thoughts turn to garden furniture and accessories. That’s right, even as my rhubarb is getting brown and crispy in its bed, I’m thinking ahead to the glorious springtime that’s only a handful of months away. I’m not crazy — it’s just that now is the best time to find stuff for the garden on sale!

This Thai Sukhothai Buddha is made with real granite and a touch of reinforced fiberglass for outdoor durability. I don’t know about you, but he makes me feel serene.

On the other hand, the traditional laughing Buddha (Buddha Maitreya) makes me feel happy! Just like his friend up there, he’s made of granite and fiberglass so he can sit out in your garden without losing his big ol’ grin.

Both are on sale at Bellacor for %15 off the usual price. Now that’s bliss!

Full disclosure: The Beard and I have a lawn. I wish I could bring myself to join the anti-lawn movement — cars all over my town sport FOOD NOT LAWNS bumper stickers — but I can hardly keep on top of the garden I already have, which is comprised of one rhubarb, four romaine lettuces, five broccolis, some carrots, and a few onions. This is one isolated in case in which I’d rather destroy than create. Pushing my squeaky old fashioned mower over my little patch of the world is wonderfully cathartic.

But while I don’t have to lovingly hunch over every inch of the thing sweating and swearing about beetles with a taste for salad greens, my lawn is not entirely maintenance free. Caring for it has brought up some interesting conundrums. I wanted to get a proper fertilizer and crabgrassicide until The Beard reminded me that we let the cats out, and they have a taste for grass. He wanted a proper power mower until I said they spewed pollution. We both wanted to pull the weeds until we read a notice sent from the city encouraging people to let ‘em grow for various green reasons.

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The Beard and I spent the weekend jumping from shop to shop, looking for the perfect patio set. What we saw was somewhat dismaying…the sturdy metal chairs had flimsy plastic seats while most of the umbrella-ready tables were far too big for our modest deck. Even boxed, the sets we liked were too big to fit into our car, and we weren’t willing to pay $250 for shipping on a $500 item!

We eventually settled on a white wicker set from Target that received rave reviews from just about everyone who bought it. At some point in the future we’ll be buying an umbrella, but that can wait. All in all, I’m pretty excited and hope it arrives quickly.

Interestingly, wicker refers not to a material, but rather to the act of weaving fibers together. A wicker chair or table may be crafted from rattan reed, bamboo, or paper fibre rush, and a lot of the wicker-style furniture in the world today is made of plastic. Natural wicker is susceptible to the elements, so it has to be covered and brought inside when not in use…or, at the very least, in the wintertime. Unlike molded plastic patio furniture, it won’t last ages and ages.

The good news is that wicker can last quite a while with proper care, as outlined in this NY Times article. Cleaning and sealing are musts!

The house that The Beard and I own — or sort of own, because a goodly portion of it still belongs to Wells Fargo — came complete with a backyard deck painted a sort of rusty red color that burns the hell out of our feet on summer afternoons. We’ve got a power sander and a couple of jugs of deck stain at the ready. What we don’t have is time!

Recently, my MIL was in town along with one of The Beard’s cousins, my own mother, and her partner. Watching our relatives carry kitchen chairs out onto the deck was a bit humbling, to say the least. We’d had two of those molded plastic chairs one can buy at the Family Dollar and a little matching table, which was fine for us. Then The Beard dropped one off of the side of the deck, meaning no more leisurely Saturday morning outdoor breakfasts. For now, at least.

Well, it seems my MIL noticed the lack of outdoor seating because before she left, she presented The Beard with a check for a thousand dollars to put toward a nice patio set. Now I’m wasting precious time scouring the Internet for ideas. I can’t decide whether to buy something chic for two (seeing as that we’ll be the ones using it 99% of the time) or a set that can accommodate larger numbers.

Here are two possibilities:

The Provence garden set would be perfect for those intimate breakfasts mentioned above, but less than ideal when guests were in town.

The Al Fresco teak set, on the other hand, would allow us to play host to at least three other people.

We’re gravitating toward something durable that’s less than the amount donated by my MIL so we can buy a few other things for our home. I’m thinking about picking up this lamp from Bellacor:

It’s lovely, it matches my living room scheme, and it costs a mere $151, which doesn’t seem like a lot when you have a thousand bucks to play with. Would I spring for it normally? Probably not because I like the thrifting game too much, but the rules have changed for the time being!

I used to hate bugs. Then I became a vegetarian, learned all about beneficial insects, and developed a live-and-let-live attitude toward nature. Now I still hate bugs, but I have to tolerate them so I don’t look like a damned hypocrite!

To a point, that is. My touchy-feely philosophy falls completely apart when it comes to anything that is going to damage my house, destroy my garden, or hurt me and The Beard. An animal that fits any of the previously listed criteria is gonna get schooled by yours truly.

There is something…or perhaps two somethings…building a nest in our modest little shed. The same somethings built a nest last summer, which we found the remains of this spring. The Beard has knocked the nest down a few times, but these somethings are extremely determined to start a family.

Why can’t I be more specific about what they are? We’re obviously not sticking our faces right up near the nest so we can compare them with pictures of flying black and yellow bugs we find online.

Suffice it to say that we’re very sure that the somethings are either paper wasps or yellowjackets. I’m hoping they’re paper wasps, because paper wasps are fairly unaggressive. Yellowjackets, on the other hand, are mean little bastards who are always on the lookout for some opportunity to throw down.

The Beard had this to say: “Yellowjackets apparently nest underground and will also whisper incorrect lotto numbers to you in your sleep, resulting in inevitable poverty. They’re jerks.” Sounds to me like the fit the gonnagetschooled criteria to me! If it does turn out our somethings are paper wasps…well, they’re still going to have to go because their preferred nesting spot is right over our shed door and when paper wasps do attack, it’s typically because their nest has been disturbed.

When it comes to striking the killing blow, Jonathan Hatch of How to Get Rid of Things has this to say:

The safest way to get rid of paper wasps is to purchase a can of pressurized wasp killer and spray the nest in a sweeping motion during the night. It is best to treat a yellowjacket nest in the late evening with either a dust insecticide like Sevin or Dursban, but usually an aerosol will do so long as the poison reaches the nest. Hell, try two cans.

Oh my goodness…please, please, please let the things be paper wasps…

Sometimes I feel like there’s a vast unseen conspiracy to make the world much, much creepier than it already is. Why else would there be a movement to give perfectly good trees faces, turning them into horrible rabid monsters that scare passing children and yours truly? I mean, how about we choose one thing and DON’T anthropomorphize it for a change?

Or not. Lee Valley Tools wants to help you turn your garden into a terrorscape of leering vegetables using just a few pieces of plastic. Much like the Bonsai Kitten kit, the Vegiforms kit molds your growing produce into a number of heinous, nightmare-inducing shapes.

At about thirteen bucks, the cost is reasonable, until you factor in all the extra gardening you”ll be doing to appease your veggie overlords. In other words, you better pull those weeds, because they’re watching you…

Available in the form of an elf for shaping eggplant, melon, pumpkin, and squash, or the “pickle pair”, corncob or heart (makes heart-shaped cross sections when sliced) for use with cucumber, zucchini and summer squash.

The molds can be used repeatedly. With zucchini, you can create a new shape every week. They might even encourage children to eat their vegetables.

Or it just might encourage them to wet the bed!

When The Beard and I first moved into our house, there was a decorative trellis set up in the back yard. It was supporting a network of vines springing forth from a main woody trunk growing right against the fence that divides our property from our neighbor’s property. At first, I left it alone thinking that it would eventually flower or so something interesting, but what a fool I was. If anything, I can only imagine that the trellis was our home’s former owner’s method of dealing with a force so malignant and ugly one can only camouflage its evil.

I’m talking about stolons. Oh, some stolons are nice enough…strawberry plants are stoloniferous, as are creeping buttercups. Others, however, do nothing useful and are determined to take over their host garden at all costs. Unlike rhizomes, which are in and of themselves a plant — at least according to Backyard Nature; other sites define them differently — stolons are just parts of a larger plant. The kicker is that a single piece of the stolon can grow into a big ol’ plant. Just when you think everything is pulled up, dug up, and gone for good, a new vine starts to grow from a three-inch long section of shoot.

Naturally, I did not know this. I was under the impression that you pull up as much of the nastyyucky root as you can and all of the ancillary bits will die off in time. After all, if you stop a heart from beating, the capillaries don’t go on living! But no, stolons are hardy little buggers with a will to survive that rivals that of the most highly stubborn animal.

When the weather here in Beverly was warm enough to allow for outdoor treks, I put on my gardening gloves, hefted my shears, and cut all of the vines off the trellis. Then I set about digging up the roots, which is when I found out just how far the shoots or stalks or whatever you want to call them traveled. I was ripping up long stretches of grass and scattering the soil in what were slated to be decorative beds. Bits and pieces of stolon not connected to any main root system were already sprouting new plants! It was a nightmare!

Or, rather, it still is a nightmare, because the original plant had spread its hellish tendrils practically everywhere by the time we moved in. I blame the house’s former owner, who decided to ignore a problem instead of tending to it. Everything I read on subject says HERBICIDE, HERBICIDE, HERBICIDE, CROSS YOUR FINGERS, AND PRAY TO WHATEVER GOD YOU WORSHIP. It sounds like a hit-or-miss strategy that also happens to be the only strategy out there.

Gah.

It’s been on heck of a day…I won’t go into details, but a certain someone from my past likes to resurface every now and again to leave insulting comments on my online journal or elsewhere. My plan to post before leaving the house for the day were curtailed when I discovered his latest escapades. Let’s just say it’s a little freaky when you discover that someone you haven’t thought of in years is still thinking about you. Tres creepy!

When I finally did get home, I decided to calm my frazzled nerves with a little retail therapy, and by little I mean very little. If we’re really going to tear the vinyl siding off of our house and paint the whole thing, we need to save our pennies. Here’s what I bought:

Ahhhhh. There’s nothing like a little civility in the form of cloth napkins, tablecloths, lotions, and a nice snack to make one feel grounded again.