Gardening can be seen as a huge part of the nomadic lifestyle and although we’re pulling through the economic crisis, it definitely wouldn’t hurt to save a bit of money with the holiday season approaching. Luckily, unlike raising your own cow, getting your dinner from the garden is pretty cost-effective and there are plenty of ways to operate on a student budget without losing quality or quantity.
1. Love Thy Neighbour
With gardening’s popularity on the rise, it’s pretty likely that your neighbour or someone living in close proximity will also want to give home-growing a go. Use this to your advantage! At the start of each growing season, have a little chat about what you plan to grow and you could find that they are already growing the carrots you wanted, while you have a whole patch of onions ready. Trading produce over your garden fence is a great way to get free food while learning how to grow new things and if you live directly next-door to one another, you could attract some beautiful animals to your garden without even trying.
Also, use local agencies like Craigslist and Freecycle to find people looking to offload extra plants out of the goodness in their heart. More often than not, the only money that will leave your wallet is for travel to pick up your new strawberry bush.
2. Buy The Best, Forget The Rest
At this point of the year, you can pick up some great bargains on gardening tools. However, consider that they’ll go through a lot more physical wear and tear than your average discount kettle, it’s probably best to fork out for the ore durable tools, even if they’re a bit more costly. The day your shovel starts competing with McDonalds arches is the day you’ll curse low-low prices.
3. One Man’s Trash…
Although I probably harp on about it pretty regularly, starting your own compost heap really can help in the long run. If you were to count up the amount of banana skins, apple cores and lemon rinds that you’ve lost along the way, you’d be surprised at how much free compost you could have for your garden. Not only will you save money by not having to buy premium compost, you’ll gain extra plants to easily add yield volume by using some of that compost in compost tea.
4. I Love A Rainy Night
It’s hard to notice it because it’s always there, but the water you use to keep your plants fed can start to add up over the summer and considering how ubiquitous water is during spring, it would be a waste to not take advantage. This is one of the easier tips to put in to practice and all you’ll need is a container with a lid. Set it down out of the shade and enjoy your free food as the heavens open up. Once the rain is done, cover it up with a lid to stop the sun from trying to steal some of it back and mosquitoes from finding a command centre to launch their attack from.
5. Don’t Forget The Seeds, Man!
As simple as it sounds, just pottering around your garden and collecting the seeds will not only save you money the following year, it will also save you the time and effort of worrying about your seeds not germinating since you know that they are genetically sound and will produce great plants. Also, don’t neglect your local farms and woodlands. Collect up seeds from the fruit and flowers of your local plants to squirrel away and you’ll have an enviable collection in no time!
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Just wanted to comment and say that the new site design looks AMAZING!! Now you should get some rest after all of your hard work, so you can get back to writing more articles…
Thanks Jenny, I’m really happy with how this turned out and seeing readers enjoying it makes it worth the effort. First posts of the new “era” coming next week.
Josh, fantastic work on the site. Looking real slick and as always a brilliant post.
Thought this comment would be appropriate here but I hope you don’t mind.
I have far too many chilli seedlings so once they are a bit bigger I am willing to part with some of them. To either yourself or some other lucky gardener that can collect. Trying to follow your point number one.
If anyones interested feel free to contact me and Happy Gardening.
.-= G-Man’s last blog ..Feeling Pepped =-.
Glad you like it George, wish I could have got more of your input during the process. Would love to swap a few of your peppers for my herbs (I have way too much green & purple basil) later on in the season. What else do you have going this year?
Sounds like a plan on all fronts.
I need some basil after my family decided to butcher it and then over water the poor thing. As for other plants thats pretty much it, as always I have left it too late and got my timing all wrong. Have bought a little rosemary shrub to fill the void of my long dead giant rosemary bush.
Let me know a time and date and we can make the exchange.
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