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8 Free Garden Materials People Throw Away Every Week

January 14, 2026 by Brandon Marcus Leave a Comment

Trash day is secretly one of the most exciting days for a gardener. While bags hit the curb and bins roll out, a small fortune in garden gold quietly disappears into landfills. Everyday items with serious soil-boosting, plant-feeding, weed-fighting potential are tossed without a second thought. This isn’t about hoarding junk or turning your yard…

8 Compost Additives Perfect for Fall Breakdowns

November 15, 2025 by Brandon Marcus Leave a Comment

Autumn has a way of turning even the most hesitant gardener into a compost enthusiast. The air cools, the leaves drop, and suddenly every twig, scrap, and leftover apple core starts whispering, “Throw me in the pile.” Fall is the season when compost bins work overtime, breaking down mountains of organic material into rich, dark,…

How To Get Free Seeds From The Government by Amanda Blankenship Seeds might seem like a small expense, but any seasoned…
Should I Use Enviro Ice On My Plants? by Kathryn Vercillo Every week, I receive food from Hungryroot. It's a great…
From Trash to Treasure: Transform Shredded Paper Into Garden Gold by Amanda Blankenship Should you use shredded paper as garden mulch? It might…
What Happens to Plants If You Use Enviro Ice on Them? by Amanda Blankenship About a year ago, I wrote our first article about…

That Half-Dead Clearance Plant Is $3 — How Do You Know If It Can Be Saved?

There is something dangerously tempting about the clearance rack at a garden center. A perennial that cost $15 in May is suddenly $3, its flowers are gone, half its leaves are brown, and the frugal gardener in you starts calculating how much money you could save if it survives. Sometimes that ugly little clearance plant…

Can You Grow Grocery Store Garlic Instead of Buying Seed Garlic?

Standing in the produce aisle, it’s easy to wonder why you’d pay a premium for seed garlic when an ordinary bulb of garlic may cost only a dollar or two. After all, garlic isn’t normally grown from botanical seed—you break a bulb apart and plant individual cloves, which makes grocery store garlic look like an…

Before You Buy Compost, Look at What’s Going in Your Trash

A bag of compost at the garden center looks like a gardening product, while the coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, cardboard, and fallen leaves leaving your house look like trash. Put those materials together correctly, however, and you have many of the ingredients needed to make homemade compost without repeatedly buying bags of soil amendment. The…

Raking Every Leaf Out of Your Garden? You May Be Throwing Away Free Mulch

Every fall, homeowners rake up something valuable, stuff it into bags, haul it to the curb—and then head to the garden center a few months later to buy mulch. Fallen leaves aren’t just seasonal debris; they’re a source of free leaf mulch that can protect soil, suppress weeds, conserve moisture, and eventually return organic matter…