Note: Check out this guest blog by Christine Scott, a writer, baby boomer, gardener, and fan of frugality:

Horse-trading trots to the big city 

Remember when the annual Christmas cookie-exchange was the social highlight of the year? Friends and neighbors gathered in someone’s home to load up on the latest gossip and returned home with a Herculean assortment of festive cookies.

In these lean economic times, some good old fashioned horse-trading is back in style. No horses?  Budget-savvy consumers have learned to apply that principle to trading perfume, clothing, purses or toys; just about anything that can be purchased can be bartered or traded.

Life’s bare necessities come first in the family budget, often leaving scant pennies for extras like landscaping.

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, at Calgary, Alberta, gardening enthusiasts have taken to hosting neighborhood plant-swaps as a way to maintain annual yard beautification … for free. With perennials selling for $5 to $10 per pot, a plant exchange fluffs up the flower beds without depleting the emergency fund!

The rules are simple: thin out your perennial plants in early spring and pot up the extras. Start with a half dozen, keeping in mind that the more plants you bring, the more you’ll be hauling back home. Label your lovelies with a popsicle stick and Sharpie, and then let the good times roll.

Last week, I headed out for my annual plant-swap with five humble lily-of-the-valley and returned with 15 assorted ferns, mosses, flowers and herbs – an embarrassment of botanical riches…all for zero deniro.

I felt I’d struck gold the next morning as each precious, and literally, price-less, plant found a place in my flowerbeds. I couldn’t help but wonder, can some things in life really be this simple, and has ‘horse trading’ once again become a respectable pastime?

Note from Lorilee: What a fabulous idea, swapping plants! What kinds of plants would you love to get for free? Do you think a plant swap could work in your neighborhood?



Perfume, you say, on an Amish-inspired blog? Keep your bonnet on there, Ida, because though the lovely Amish ladies may not spritz perfume (and I’m not sure they don’t), but they do barter for free stuff.

This inspires me to tell you the story of how my dainty wrists are now sprayed on special occasions with a five-star perfume which I got for nothing. Nothing! Or at least no cash money. [Read more...]