Good work! You certainly will be rewarded by more than simply the beauty arising from your efforts for the environment.

I tried to do my part. A friend lost 12 of her Yaupon 'nana' due to our summer and following winter drought. She is not much for taking care of and watering her landscape.

Yaupons are usually very tolerant of drought, but she also had not cut back the nearby dormant hosta, so her yaupons also suffered by getting to much shade from those dormant overgrown hostas this last winter.

Yesterday, I searched all over town and found her nine of the nicest Encore Autumn 'Royalty' azaleas. They are now in their first full bloom and I wanted to pull out her dead yaupons and put down the bed for the azaleas this morning, and then easily plant the azaleas into that circular bed later today during the cool down of the beginning evening hours.

Not to be, the friend and her DH had other plans, so all I did today was take her azaleas out of my vehicle and put them in dappled shade under my mature Scarlet oak tree.

After that the only other thing I did was go to a nursery and purchase about 21 cubic feet (six bags of 3.5 cubic feet each) of compacted dry Sphagnum peat moss for later either creating the bed for those azaleas or for taking to my daughters house in a few weeks to mix with the sand on top of a clay hardpan base soil in her front landscape bed.

Except for watering my landscape (we are still in a drought,) I have not done any thing else for earth Day.

At least earth day is not the only day that we can help "the black earth live again."