Simple ways to save money while you garden
You can spend $100—or considerably more—on a beautiful young tree, carefully drive it home, dig a hole, and unintentionally create a problem before you’ve even put the shovel away. The mistake costs nothing: planting the tree too deeply. Digging the planting hole too deep the most common mistake when planting a tree. However, improper depth…
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…
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…
Mulch is one of those garden purchases that doesn’t seem expensive until you calculate how many bags it takes to cover an entire landscape. A 3-inch layer across a 100-square-foot bed requires roughly 25 cubic feet of material, so even modest gardens can consume plenty of bagged mulch. Yet free garden mulch may already be…
Gardening advice is full of promises that you can stop buying supplies and simply use whatever is already sitting around the house. Sometimes that’s excellent advice: fallen leaves really can replace purchased organic matter, cardboard can help create a new bed, and saved containers can eliminate the need for some new pots. Other free garden…
If maintaining a compost pile sounds like one garden chore too many, you may have wondered why you can’t simply bury your vegetable peels and coffee grounds directly in the soil. It turns out you can—gardeners sometimes call the technique trench composting, in-place composting, or compost pockets. Instead of decomposing organic material in a separate…
Walk through a mature perennial garden and you may be looking at hundreds of dollars’ worth of plants you haven’t created yet. Hostas, daylilies, irises, bee balm, and several other common perennials can be dug up and separated into multiple plants, giving you an inexpensive way to fill empty beds without another garden-center trip. The…
Before you buy another bag of compost, stack of seed-starting pots, or roll of weed barrier, take a look inside your recycling bin and trash can. Some of the most useful free garden materials are things households routinely throw away, from cardboard boxes and coffee grounds to fallen leaves and empty containers. That doesn’t mean…