I’m sure you have seen those beautiful gardens in magazines and on the DIY channel. All of those gardens are amazing but starting your own garden can be pricey! Flowers, seeds, soil, containers, sod, weed killer and fertilizer are just some of the things you need to budget for when starting a garden. Once you get the garden store these prices will start to add up quick and might make you re-think your dream of having a beautiful garden.
Before you give up on that dream of a garden, read these tips on how to start a garden on a budget!
Frugal Gardening Tips
Start Small
As stated above starting a garden can be expensive! So many people start a garden and two weeks later realize they really don’t enjoy maintaining a garden. This can end up meaning you wasted a lot of money. If this is your first year starting a garden start small. Consider growing a few herbs inside the house or maybe look into square foot gardening. Square foot gardening is also a great thing to research if you don’t have a lot of yard space. Starting small will give you the opportunity to see if you even enjoy gardening and it will also save you a lot of money.
Start a Community Garden
If you have a large area for a garden consider asking a neighbor or two if they are interested in sharing the garden with you. This will allow you to split the responsibilities, the cost and the food you grow. A community garden is also a great way to get involved with your neighbors and really get to know the people you are living next to.
Starting a community garden will also give you the opportunity to split the start-up costs of the garden. Seeds and other supplies get expensive so having someone to split the costs with will save you some money.
DIY Fertilizer
Buying fertilizer can really start to add up so make your own! Composting is the perfect way to reduce the amount of garbage you put into the land fields and it makes a terrific fertilizer for your garden. Before you get starting with composting you will need a compost bin. A compost bin can run you $25 and all the way up into the hundreds of dollars! Yes, these things can get extremely expensive and fast! Before you run out and purchase a compost bin, consider making your own. Just a quick search on Pinterest will give you plenty of tutorials on making your own composting bin. You should be able to make your own compost bin for under $20.
Prevention
Once you have your garden going you will want to do regular maintenance. One of the easiest ways to save money is to make sure you are doing regular maintenance and prevention in your garden. Spend some time cutting weeds, checking for disease infested plants, getting a handle on bug infestations and any other issues you see. Doing these things on a regular basis will mean spending less money once these issues get totally out of control.
See how my garden is doing here.
Composting and using DIY fertilizers seems a more cost saving way of gardening. Thanks for the tips.