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(Wildlife creatures) Planting Austin Friendly Flowers : A Guide To A Low Maintenance Garden

By Ki Gray

 Do you love the beauty and color of flowers but cringe at the thought of the maintenance required for their upkeep? If your colorful blooms have a tendency to turn brown and crunchy from neglect in the hot Austin sun, there may be some flowers made just for you. Flora native or adapted to the Austin area thrive where others perish, resisting drought, pests and other hazards. Just choose your plants wisely and you can have fabulous landscaping for your property with little work.

There are many benefits to growing native plants. In addition to saving on water and fertilizer you save on time by choosing plants that thrive in the unique climate of Austin Texas. Your gardening is also more enjoyable when you are not fighting mother nature in an attempt to grow plants that are not suited to the Texas Climate. It is also nice to help maintain the original ecosystem of your locale by promoting local plants and flowers.

Perennials are an essential part of a vibrant landscape, and a beautiful choice for any Texas flowerbed is Cedar Sage. A shade lover, Cedar Sage has bright red spiky flowers that bloom spring through summer and can bring a pop of color to an otherwise gloomy spot in your yard. Sage comes in several other varieties, too, including Majestic Sage, Mealy Blue Sage and Mexican Sage bush all of which produce beautiful flowers and require very little water, just like Cedar Sage.

Trailing Lantana is another great choice, especially when used as a ground cover. It is very tolerant of poor conditions, highly drought resistant, and its lavender flowers are very attractive to butterflies.

Purple Cone Flowers, also know as Echinacea, require a little more water than the previous plants, but they are nonetheless exceptional specimens for an Austin garden. These daisy-like flowers are a Texas native and produce violet or white blooms. Preferring sun or partial shade, they can be planted almost anywhere.

Mexican Honeysuckle is another low-water plant. It displays its orange flowers spring to frost, attracting hummingbirds with its sweet smell. It only requires an occasional pruning to encourage full growth.

Ornamental grasses are another option for sprucing up your landscape, and there are many hardy varieties to choose from, such as Big Muhly, Little Bluestem and Dwarf Fountain Grass. Some grasses can be quite invasive, so be careful where you plant them, because they will thrive and take over.

These are only a few of the many ideal plants for your Texas landscape. There are a multitude of choices available out there, so next time you go to a nursery, make sure you do your homework first or ask the people running the nursery which plants and flowers are native to Texas. The city of Austin has worked to promote a green and environmentally friendly city. The city of Austin has a Grow Green plant list featuring native and adapted landscape plants that thrive in Texas. By planting smart you can save water, fertilizer and time.

Ki works as a realtor in the central Austin real estate market helping individuals looking for homes as well as investors looking for cashflow properties. His site provides a free search of the Austin MLS along with a blog covering news and statistics on the Austin Texas real estate market.

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The Ramifications Of High Fuel Prices
By GARKO

 There are millions of drivers on the American roads and each has an individual story about how the unprecedented price of gasoline affects their own personal lives.

How many times must we sit on freeze frame highways must turn into parking lots because some poor fellow discovered they were running on empty at just that worst possible moment?

How many more abandoned vehicles will there be left behind on the backstreets of this nation from poor folks who could not afford the cost of gasoline in addition to their monthly lease payments for their car and their insurance on top of everything else?

What is the cost in terms of ruined days and happiness turned to despair because of financial stress aided and abetted by skyrocketing fuel prices?

Any time one starts to engage with other people beyond their immediate circle then they are impacting lives in ways unseen.

I had a somewhat popular ebook on traffic shortcuts in Los Angeles. It sold a few copies. Too few! lol

Sometimes I would get the idea what if someone I sent down some road somewhere on some search for the holy shortcut wound up in good or bad circumstances because of my little ebook! .

Take that small example and compare it to how many lives are affected in so many different ways by the out of control rise in gas prices

Life is a series of causes affecting other causes in a domino fashion while each piece has an option to fall, not fall, where to fall, in other words each piece in the dominoes game of life has self determinism but there is still this causes affecting causes factor which can lead us in directions that hold surprises. That is the plus and the minus.

So what really is the cost of skyrocketing fuel prices?

And how do we, as individuals, as pieces in the dominoes game of life that still manage to have self determinism take the right actions so as to stop being ripped off by large corporations and their greedy operations?

There are those who reject that they have self determinism or that their self determinism is sufficient to make any great changes in their fate.

But such people might as well be dead and they are just waiting for someone to come along with a shovel.

In today’s world there are cures for cancer to be found if one does some research, just as there solutions to global warming, the environmental waste of New Orleans and the health problems of the 911 first responders if one doesn’t take no for an answer and the solutions applied, there is a solution on an individual level to free us from slavery to the fuel pump.

Did you know you can lower the gas consumption of a car with water? A hybrid engine using both fuel and water can be installed quite easily. A fully hydrogen engine system can be implemented with just a bit of knowledge, resourcefulness and effort.

You will be rewarded withmore money in your pocket, a cleaner environment, a happier fuel guzzler and in so many unforeseen ways that could have positive ramifications that it really is wise to make the small investment of time and caring to get your fuel guzzler modified to a hydrogen system.

Learn how to increase power and save gas and how to run a car on hydrogen from water which is one the best of the ways to improve your MPG by learning all the SECRETS of Water Car Technology

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Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 5:45 pm and is filed under environmental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.