Have you ever heard someone say something along the lines of, I just harvested my first $100 tomato? Well this is referring to the high cost that starting or maintaining a garden can incur, but it doesn’t have to be this way. There are lots of cost cutting solutions to gardening, and we’re gonna talk about some today.
“A great way to reduce costs is to set up a seed sharing program with your neighbors or other gardeners in your area.”
5 Cost Saving Tips for Gardening
- Look for low cost seeds. A lot of times when we buy packets, they can come with too many seeds for our home garden and we don’t necessarily need that whole packet. So a great way to reduce costs is to set up a seed sharing program with your neighbors or other gardeners in your area.
- You can also look at the local libraries and extension programs because a lot of times they offer free seeds and educational resources. Another great way to get low cost or free seeds is to save your seeds year after year.
- Look for low cost soil or set up a compost program. We have three bins of compost, and then once the compost is done, we have a system of sifting it, which allows us to get rid of all those larger pieces of mulch that can be damaging to plants and just hard to plant and garden in general.
- Filling raised beds. An issue you can run into when you have a really high raised beds is it can be difficult and very expensive to fill the whole thing with soil. So a cost saving solution is to fill the first half with other landscape materials like stones and large sticks. Then after that, you can put a piece of cardboard which will eventually break down, but it helps you get that nice even surface layer and then fill it with some sand and rocks for drainage, and then add your soil.
- Reduce irrigation costs. A lot of times when setting up a garden, irrigation can be a big factor in how much our water bill is gonna be. So an easy way to reduce this is by getting drip line or drip tape. Holes in the drip line let water go directly into the soil, which is great because sometimes overhead, sprinklers and other irrigation like that can cause a lot of waste.
These have been five tips in how to reduce the cost of setting up and maintaining your garden! Join the conversation on Instagram @beyondgoldandsilver Follow us to see behind the scenes content & more!
