Simple ways to save money while you garden
When fall cleanup arrives, you don’t necessarily have to pull every carrot from the garden and make room for bags of produce in the refrigerator. In many climates, overwintering carrots lets the soil serve as a surprisingly effective storage space, allowing you to dig fresh roots weeks or even months after the normal harvest season….
October can feel like the month when gardening starts shutting down, but one of the year’s best opportunities is sitting in bags and boxes at garden centers right now. Plant the right spring flowering bulbs this fall, and you’ll get weeks of color next year without buying trays of annuals or starting dozens of seeds….
If your tomatoes are fading and the first frost is showing up on the forecast, don’t assume this year’s vegetable garden is finished. Several cool-season crops grow quickly enough to squeeze another harvest from beds that would otherwise sit empty, and some tolerate temperatures that would wipe out summer vegetables overnight. The trick is choosing…
For years, the standard fall routine was simple: rake every leaf, stuff the pile into bags, and make the lawn look as though autumn never happened. Now gardeners are increasingly told to “leave the leaves,” which sounds wonderfully easy until a thick layer of wet maple leaves is plastered across the grass. The truth is…
Every fall, homeowners rake up something useful, stuff it into bags, haul it away, and then head back to the garden center a few months later to buy products that do many of the same jobs. Fallen leaves aren’t simply yard debris; they’re a free source of organic material that can protect soil, suppress weeds,…
You finish an avocado, look at the enormous pit left on the cutting board, and wonder why you’d throw away something that appears perfectly capable of becoming another plant. The good news is that growing an avocado tree from a pit really does work, and you don’t need an expensive propagation kit to try it….
The garden center’s clearance table can become dangerously tempting in fall: that perennial you refused to pay $30 for in May is suddenly wearing an $8 sticker. Saving $22 sounds like a fantastic gardening win, but planting clearance perennials in fall only saves money if the plant survives long enough to return next spring. Fall…
It seems logical that giving plants one final meal before winter would help them survive the cold, but the opposite can happen when fertilizer encourages growth at exactly the wrong time. As days shorten and temperatures fall, perennial and woody plants begin hardening off, a process that prepares living tissue to withstand winter conditions. Penn…
A bag of garlic looks like groceries, but biologically, you’re also looking at a surprising amount of potential planting material. Each bulb separates into individual cloves, and each healthy clove can potentially grow into an entirely new bulb, making planting garlic in fall one of the more satisfying ways to turn a small amount of…