If you are trying to stick to a tight budget, you need to find ways to cut back on your big expenses. There are a lot of ways that you can save money on your energy bills, which makes it easier to manage your money every month and it’s better for the environment as well. But when people are looking for ways to cut costs around their home, they often forget about the garden. If you have a fairly big outdoor space, it can actually be quite expensive to run, but it tends to go unnoticed. If you added up all of the money that you spend in the garden over the course of a year, you’d probably be quite surprised. Unfortunately, gardening is a necessary expense unless you want it to get overgrown and turn into a jungle. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to spend as much money as you are right now. These are some of the easiest ways to save money in the garden.
Cut Back On Water Costs
The cost of water is probably your biggest garden expense, so that’s the best place to start when you are looking for ways to save money. The best thing that you can do is to install some water tanks to collect rainwater. That way, you can recycle water and use it to water your plants instead of having to get it from the tap, which will save you a lot of money. You should also look for ways to use less water if possible. Using a better watering system is a great way to do that. If you use drip irrigation to water the plants instead of a standard sprinkler, water is delivered straight to the roots, so you don’t need to use anywhere near as much. It’s better for the plants because it avoids over or under watering, and it saves you a lot of money in water bills at the same time.
Another simple way to save money on water and make your plants healthier is to keep up with the weather forecast. If it’s likely to rain a lot and you continue watering your plants as much as you normally would, they’re getting too much water. Why not just let the rain do all of the hard work instead? You can even get smart sprinkler systems that connect to the internet and monitor the weather, and then make adjustments accordingly. If you spend a bit of money on the right watering system, you can be a lot more efficient with what you use and save a lot of money.
Grow From Seeds
When you are adding new plants to the garden, it’s easiest to buy seedlings or fully grown plants and put them in, but it’s a lot more expensive. If you want to save yourself a lot of money, you should learn to grow from seeds instead. You can pick up a pack of seeds for next to nothing and if you shop in the off season, you can usually get discounts. It does take longer and there is a higher chance of failure if you don’t look after them properly, but you will save yourself a lot of money. It’s also more fun and satisfying to watch a plant grow from a tiny seed instead of just buying it fully grown and planting it in the garden.
Learn To Propagate Plants
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Once you’ve managed to grow some plants from seeds, you need to learn how to propagate them. When you propagate a plant, you take a cutting from it and it will grow into a new plant. There are a lot of different ways to do this depending on the plant, so you will need to do a bit of research, but it usually involves taking a stem or a leaf and waiting for roots to grow before you plant it again. In some cases, you can just take the seeds from a plant and start again from scratch to get new plants. Once you learn to propagate plants, you basically have an endless supply and you can keep reproducing them. That means that you don’t need to keep buying brand new plants for the garden every single year, you just need to buy the seeds once. You can also get more plants to go inside the house or even to give to people as gifts.
Reuse Containers
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When you are starting seeds or trying to grow small seedlings before putting them out in the garden, you’ll need some containers. If you go to a garden center, you can get all sorts of different things for this, but there’s no need to spend any money at all really because you probably have containers in the house already that you can reuse. Egg boxes and yogurt pots are both great for starting off seeds and you can use the plastic trays from fruit and vegetables to grow young plants in. It’s a great way to save money and you’re reusing that plastic so you can cut back on waste at the same time. You should think about upcycling containers for your indoor plants as well. Any old tins or jars can easily be used as a small plant pot and you can and there are all sorts of things like crates or tires that can be used as big planters outside. Plant pots can be quite expensive, but there’s no need to keep buying them if you just get a bit creative with your recycling.
Start A Compost Heap
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If you buy bags of compost, you’re wasting money. It’s not that difficult to start your own compost heap, and you’ll have an endless supply for free. You only need to add scraps of food that would just end up in the bin anyway, so it’s better for the environment and cheaper for you as well. It will also improve the soil in your garden, so your plants will grow a lot more effectively.
These are all simple ways that you can get an amazing garden without spending too much money on it.
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