Gardening on a Very Low Budget in Four Steps

July 4th, 2012 Garden

Despite what those price tags say at the local mega-mart and gardening store, you can actually plant a beautiful, bountiful garden for only a few bucks. As long as you’re using some different tips and techniques, you can find many great ways to garden on a budget. The best part is, you will still get as much out of your garden as the guy up the street who’s paying hundreds of dollars for his fancy garden with his chemical-laden mulch! You can go organic and save big.

A compost heap is perhaps one of the easiest things to make on your own when it comes to organic gardening. The biggest obstacle here is actually leaving your compost pile to sit out in the yard for a few seasons or an entire year. But over the course of a year, you should just start throwing your organic food waste into a pile, along with yard waste like leaves and branches and grass trimmings. Once that sets up and breaks down, it will turn into mineral-rich compost that’s 100 percent organic. And it will be 100 percent free!

Lasagna gardening is a method that requires very, very little work and very little money. You don’t even have to dig a hole or create a border around your garden at all. To start out with your lasagna garden, you simply begin to stack up different layers, as if you’re building a lasagna. You want to start out by laying down some compost, then laying a layer of dirt, and then finishing off with some mineral-rich topsoil (you can just use more compost here). After you plant everything, you can mulch it. It will be stacked up like lasagna, but it will grow just like a normal garden.

If you did not create your own compost, or if you just don’t have enough of it and want to supplement it, you can buy some compost from a local farmer or even from the municipality in which you live. It will still be 100 percent organic, and you might only have to pay around 10 bucks or so for an entire truckload of the stuff! They’re really trying to get rid of it, as it’s just waste that will be thrown in a dump if not used in a garden.

There are a few different ways to explain this, some of which might be a bit complicated for the beginning gardener, but suffice it to say that you should simply make sure that you’re planting using organic compost. What’s the big deal here? Well, when you’re planting with some good compost, you’re actually giving back to the ground instead of taking away from it. You’re adding minerals to the soil, and more things are going to grow there over time.

Throughout the entire article above, the only real expense you have to worry about is the compost if you buy it and the actual seeds for your garden. Everything else can be done with a little bit of labor. You don’t have to spend big to grow big.