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Just because finances are tight, it doesn't mean your garden needs to suffer. You reap the beauty and joy that gardening brings to your life while living a frugal lifestyle. The tips contained in this guide will help you learn how to garden on a budget.
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Introduction
- Gardening provides exercise, increases the value of your property, and can provide a sense of beauty and calm to your life. If you enjoy gardening, you don't need to stop just because finances are tight!
Step 1: Determine Your Priorities
- Before starting to garden, determine what your priorities are. If you're planting vegetables or annual flowers, for example, seed packets are relatively inexpensive so you should be able to match your desires and budget easily. If you have major holes in your landscaping you'd like to fill, you may need to be a bit more creative to get shrubs and perennials you can afford.
Step 2: Get a Little Help from Your Friends' Gardens
- There are several ways your friends can help you out, without spending any time or money. You can volunteer to help them with some basic gardening chores, and walk away with plants. Although these methods won't produce the instant impact of buying mature plants at a nursery, you'll have the assurance of knowing that these shrubs perform well in your climate, and they will cost you absolutely nothing.
- Certain shrubs, such as lilacs, reproduce by sending up new plants, called suckers, around the base. These take energy from the main plant that should be going into flowers, and should be removed to increase blooms. Volunteer to dig them up. You'll save your friend a chore, and get some free plants for your own yard.
- Most shrubs need to be pruned annually to maintain their shape. If you adore the look of an azalea or pjam rhododendron that adorns a neighbor's yard, ask them when they'll be pruning. Suggest that you'll be willing to hall away their debris. You can take cuttings from the prunings, and with the cost of a bottle of rooting hormone and a few containers of potting soil, reproduce those gorgeous plants in your own yard.
- Perennials need to be divided every three years to stay healthy. This can be a tedious job for a gardener. Your friend may appreciate the help in return for the divisions that they won't be using in their own yard.
Step 3: Use Organic Gardening Techniques
- Compost that you make from your own kitchen scraps and yard waste is a great way to enhance your soil. Using organic treatments that you mix yourself for weeds and pests not only helps the environment, but saves you money.
Step 4: Let Your Annuals Go to Seed
- Seeds don't always reproduce true from year to year, because of modern hybridizing techniques. Saving seeds may not work for vegetables, where you don't want to risk investing time and coming up with something you can't eat. That is not a problem with flowers, however, where the variations tend to occur in color. During the season, you encourage blooms by dead-heading flowers before they go to seed. Towards the end of the season, stop dead-heading, and allow a few flowers to mature into seed pods. Saving these seeds will give you a head start on next season!
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