Keeping Your Garden In Great Condition

Very much like your hair - your garden grows and it won't stop until you cut it! Or get it cut. One way or another, someone is going to have to work hard at getting your garden into shape. Keeping your garden in good condition is going to seem like hard work, a chore and a bore at times - but you deserve a nice garden to sit in!

There are plenty of tools needed to keep a garden looking good. A lawnmower, pruning tools, hedge trimmers, gloves, rakes, trowels and hoes are the basic tools among others that people use to keep their garden in great condition. These tools are widely available, can be cheap and are easy to find.

The basis of the garden is the lawn, and if yours is in terrible condition there are a number of things you can do. You can either tear it up and replant it with a new species of grass that will afford a little bit more protection. You can attempt to care for it, or you can hire a lawn care service to take care of it. All of these options have their merits, but as usual - getting the professionals in is likely the best thing to do for the longevity of your lawn. It is truly the carpet of the garden and needs to be cared for in that manner!

If the lawn is the floor, then the trees are the ceiling. Tree branches can be a big obstruction and in some cases, a major hazard. What's more, some types of tree are plain ugly and can harbor all sorts of nasty insects and the like. If you don't like a tree, you shouldn't take an axe to it - that can be incredibly dangerous. Get a professional to deal with an ugly, or fearsome tree. Trees do have their benefits, though! They can add a lot of green and privacy to your home. Hedges are the wall of the garden and don't need much care, but they can grow a bit wild, so a trim will be needed at least once per year. Like trees, they add that little bit of natural privacy to a garden.

You can also add to your garden with plants, shrubs, fruits and vegetables! Cordon off sections of your garden and add the requirements needed for your chosen plants. Shrubs need little care, but most kinds of flower, plant, fruit and vegetable need constant care to protect them not only from the environment, but the pests that will look to feast on them. Certain types of fruit and vegetable will only grow during certain seasons, so it is well worth the time taken to research information on seeds and growth before you stick them in the ground only to find that you have wasted not just your money, but your time.

Keeping a garden tidy is a constant process, that doesn’t mean it is impossible though! With the right tools, mindset and research, you can master your garden in no time at all.

It's Not Just about School Work, You Have to Teach Your Children about Life Too

A common problem in this day and age is that people feel as if their time at school didn’t prepare them enough for adulthood and adult-life, and that they were just thrust into it without really understanding what they were doing, and still don’t. The aspects of adulthood that this refers to is things like the value of money, the value of hard work and the value of spending time with family. Does school really prepare students for adult life? If you don’t think it does, then take matters into your own hands and make sure your kids are prepared for adulthood straight away once they grow into it.

You can start by making sure that they understand the value of money, and how they have to work hard to earn it and then subsequently earn what they wish to spend it on. You can entice your children to do things such as their homework, good work at school or even household chores by offering them a coin in return if they do it. This could simply be spare pieces of shrapnel that you have lying around in the bottom of your purse or wallet that means virtually nothing to you, but you could tell them that you will have it back off them in exchange for gifts such as extra time on their games console or being able to stay up a bit later on the weekend. This would mean that you are teaching them that they have to work hard, and sometimes do things that aren’t fun, in order to earn physical pieces of money as well as teaching them the fundamentals of basic earning and spending as they exchange their newfound fortune for gifts that they really want. You could even go one step further and offer them specialised and child-friendly coins or paper bills in order to help your children recognise that achievement, good performance and being a good person is met by rewards. If this interests you, then why not go the whole hog and and purchase a coin case that will be a form of inspiration for your children as it will be a constant reminder that it needs to be filled, and the only way they can fill it is by working hard and earning coins. The technique of offering such coins and coin cases is a great tactic for not only parents, but for teachers, coaches and those of you who are in charge of scout groups. The coins are affordable, but still cost more than using your spare cash; however, if you think it may not seem like a wise thing to spend your money on, if implemented correctly it can be.

Teach your children about money

You should also seek to teach your children the importance of spending time with family. You should do so trying to never cut contact with any member of family unless you really have to, because if your children grow up thinking that one family member can be ignored, they may think that all family can be ignored. You should also try to implement on them your family’s history in as fun a way as possible so that they don’t get bored. A way to do so is to blend talking about the history in with normal conversation as much as possible. You can find more family history activities for children here.

Family time with your children

So, if you don’t want your children to be hit by adulthood and not have the life lessons or tools to properly deal with it, then take the matter of preparing them for it into your own hands because the teachers at their school have enough on their hands in trying to teach them academically.

Personal Finances

Managing money in today's marketplace can be challenging. For a sailors like me, frequent deployments, separation from extended families, numerous moves and anticipated emergencies drain the resources of military families. In the navy, there are trained personal financial fitness coaches that help us analyze our finances which is pretty good especially for a spender person like me, good thing that my wife is very good in managing our finances. Those coaches help us set priorities in order for us to focus on what need to be paid first and eliminate those that we don't really need. They also create spending plans and make our money work as hard as we do.