Simple ways to save money while you garden
By the time the last tomato plant comes out of the ground, it’s tempting to toss your shovel, pruners, and trowels into the shed and forget about them until spring. That shortcut can leave you opening the shed months later to find rusted metal, dull blades, cracked handles, and tools that are harder to use…
That perfectly shaped mountain of mulch around your tree might make the yard look professionally landscaped, but it could be doing more harm than good. Mulch is genuinely beneficial when used correctly because it conserves soil moisture, moderates temperature, suppresses weeds, and protects trees from lawn equipment. The problem starts when homeowners keep adding fresh…
You’ve probably seen the kitchen hack: instead of throwing away the bottom of a head of romaine lettuce, put it in water and supposedly grow yourself more lettuce for free. It sounds almost too good to be true, especially when the original lettuce has already been eaten and the stump was headed for the compost…
There is something dangerously tempting about the clearance rack at a garden center. A perennial that cost $15 in May is suddenly $3, its flowers are gone, half its leaves are brown, and the frugal gardener in you starts calculating how much money you could save if it survives. Sometimes that ugly little clearance plant…
Standing in the produce aisle, it’s easy to wonder why you’d pay a premium for seed garlic when an ordinary bulb of garlic may cost only a dollar or two. After all, garlic isn’t normally grown from botanical seed—you break a bulb apart and plant individual cloves, which makes grocery store garlic look like an…
A bag of compost at the garden center looks like a gardening product, while the coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, cardboard, and fallen leaves leaving your house look like trash. Put those materials together correctly, however, and you have many of the ingredients needed to make homemade compost without repeatedly buying bags of soil amendment. The…
Every fall, homeowners rake up something valuable, stuff it into bags, haul it to the curb—and then head to the garden center a few months later to buy mulch. Fallen leaves aren’t just seasonal debris; they’re a source of free leaf mulch that can protect soil, suppress weeds, conserve moisture, and eventually return organic matter…
Open the average kitchen trash can and you may find the beginnings of next year’s garden soil hiding among the garbage. Fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds, eggshells, and several other everyday scraps are perfectly suited to backyard composting, where microorganisms eventually transform them into a useful soil amendment. The Environmental Protection Agency says home…
Anyone who has priced perennials, vegetable starts, or houseplants lately knows how quickly a few small pots can wreck a gardening budget. That makes it tempting to snip an interesting branch hanging over a sidewalk or quietly pocket a succulent leaf at the garden center, but someone else’s plant isn’t suddenly public property because you…