Simple ways to save money while you garden
Fall cleanup season has a way of making every overgrown shrub look like it needs a haircut. Before you grab the pruning shears, however, remember that some of next spring’s flowers are already sitting on those branches in the form of buds that developed months earlier. Spring-flowering shrubs commonly bloom on “old wood,” meaning growth…
A $60 shrub marked down to $20 can make the garden-center clearance rack very difficult to walk past. Fall discounts on trees and shrubs can be genuine bargains, particularly when retailers simply need to reduce inventory before winter, but a low price doesn’t automatically make a struggling plant worth rescuing. Plants that have spent months…
We’ve all found one: a forgotten potato at the back of the pantry with several determined-looking sprouts growing from its eyes. Throwing it away feels wasteful, especially when those sprouts make it look ready to become an entire crop of free potatoes. Technically, planting grocery store potatoes can produce plants because the potato itself is…
A two-dollar bag of pinto or black beans looks like dinner, not a packet of garden seed. But dried beans are mature seeds, which raises an irresistible frugal-gardening question: could you take a handful from the grocery bag, put them in the ground, and eventually harvest far more beans than you started with? The answer…
You spent an afternoon planting tulips, daffodils, or crocuses, cleaned the dirt from your hands, and then suddenly had a terrible thought: Were some of those bulbs upside down? Garden instructions usually tell you to put the pointed end up and the flatter root end down, so realizing you may have reversed a few can…
The first chilly weekend of fall can make gardeners feel like they’re racing a deadline: cut everything down, rake every leaf, clear every bed, and leave the yard spotless before winter arrives. But that traditional approach can create unnecessary work while removing winter habitat that birds, bees, butterflies, moths, and other beneficial creatures use until…
That half-used bag of potting mix left over from summer may represent $10, $15, or even $20 you won’t have to spend again next spring. But tossing an open bag behind the shed, leaving it where rain can reach it, or forgetting it beside your containers for several months can turn perfectly usable growing media…
Every fall, millions of homeowners repeat the same ritual: rake the leaves, stuff them into bags, drag them to the curb, and wonder how another pile appeared overnight. But what if you simply stopped? The answer is more complicated than the popular advice to either “leave the leaves” or remove every last one, because leaving…
That automatic watering schedule that kept your tomatoes alive through July may be doing too much work by late September. Cooler days, longer nights, weaker sunlight, and seasonal rain can all change how quickly moisture disappears from garden soil, yet it’s easy to keep watering simply because that’s what you’ve done all summer. Too much…