Community Landscape Article

Gardening And Landscaping On A Tight Budget

Those well-manicured lawns and those beautifully-kept gardens usually come with one unseen little addition: a rather exorbitant price tag. Everyone loves to have a beautiful looking garden but it isn’t everyone’s good fortune to be able to spend a lot of money achieving that dream. The general rule of thumb is that if a garden is complicated and terribly manicured, it means one has to have spent a great deal of money on it. Whether it is exotic plants, the materials for landscaping, they all mean money.

However, we are here to give you tips on how to have a nice-looking garden without paying a huge price for it. Let’s take topiaries. Don’t spend money here on expensive forms. You could, instead make do with a tomato cage that is very cheap. Tie the legs down with twist wire or any plastic coated wire and then using this as a framework, form the plant on it.

If you want to put up hanging plants or grow climbing vines, you need something sturdy and for this, you’ll find that old pipes do the job well. Or maybe even an old curtain rod that can be extended as and when the vines keep growing!

What also adds to the expense is the fertilizer. In order to save on your fertilizer, the best thing would be to make some of your own. Start making your own compost by putting all your dry leaves into a container. Cover the leaves with garden soil and turn it upside down on the ground. A few weeks later, you’ll get blackish-brown compost from this and it works very well indeed as fertilizer for your plants. What’s more it’s natural and you use the waste material from your own garden and turn it into plant food.

If some plants need large containers to grow in, you can economize on the amount of soil used by putting in fillers at the base of the container. Aluminum cans are great for this as they also make the containers more lightweight and easy to lug around. When it comes to pathways, use broken pots and gravel instead of bricks. These are good for border stones as well. Bricks also make good pillars and they are usually constructed by a mason and could cost a lot. However, recycled bricks are a good alternative. You can put 4 bricks together, 4 more on top of them and keep going till you reach the height you want. On top of that, place a wide stepping stone to hold the whole thing together. This weights it down and keeps it stable.

Just a little bit of thought and you’ll find there are numerous ways that you can cut down on the expense of building and maintaining a beautiful garden. Everything that is beautiful about a garden does not need to be expensive. There are so many ways that you can spend little and make things look beautiful.