By on April 16, 2015Home & Garden
I’m sitting here at my desk with the sun streaming through the open window, birds yelling their heads off down in the garden.
It’s already looking beautiful out there, thanks to all the money saving gardening tips I’ve adopted over the nine ears we’ve been in this house.
Here are some of my favourites.
13 cool money saving gardening tips
- You don’t need to buy a hedgehog house. Pile up dead leaves, twigs and grass cuttings in quiet corners and they’ll make their own nests. You can make bee houses too, by tying together a bunch of different sized hollow plant stems or bamboo sections
- Make a cheap compost container using an ordinary windbreak. Just hammer the poles into the ground in a cube shape. When you want to use your new compost, just pull up one of the posts for easy access
- Beg, borrow and steal rockery materials from skips, builders working near you and fellow gardeners
- For a cheap rockery, pile up a load of old broken brick and concrete, cover it with a generous amount of topsoil and just use expensive big decorative rocks to cover the top
- Leave moss where it is. It’s gorgeous stuff, a stunning green, and wildlife loves it. Ivy too. Apparently it doesn’t damage buildings, that’s an old wives tale
- Forget trying to combat bindweed with expensive, nasty chemicals. I tried a spot-on bindweed killer last year and it worked… but this year there’s more of it than ever. It’s great for wildlife and actually really pretty, so this year I’m letting the Convulvulus have its own way, apart from pulling up the most intrusive plants
- You can put plants in more or less any container, whether or not it has drainage holes. Pile in a heap of small pebbles or stones for drainage and plant lovely things in old shoes, vases, boxes lined with pierced bin bags, colourful plastic trugs with holes pierced in the bottom, funky toy wheelbarrows, old washing machine and tumble drier drums…
- Collect seeds when you’re out and about. No harm done!
- Build a low cost garden pond using our special guide
- Use segments of tree trunk for garden seating, adding a concrete paving or stepping stone on top
- Let weeds invade your lawn. They’re stunning, especially close-up, as well as more drought-resistant than ordinary lawn turf. And it saves a fortune on lawn treatments and food because wild plants don’t need extra fertiliser. Quite the opposite. Mow them as you’d mow a normal lawn and they shrink. Eventually you’ll have have a wildlife friendly, rugged, unusual lawn full of of ‘bonsai’ wildflowers and plants
- Make garden sculptures from segments of wood, piling them up into a dramatic totem pole and glueing them together for safety, if you feel the need, with No More Nails glue
- Make your own garden tea light holders from jam jars, either tied with string to trees or set part-way into the ground
What about your cheap gardening tips?
If you’ve recycled or re-purposed things for your garden, we’d love to know about it.
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