At a time when many households are focused on their budget and the bottom line, finding ways to be thrifty is not only smart, but also often necessary.
So if you are concerned about the cost of living, Australian horticulturalist and television personality Sophie Thomson provides practical steps to save money and let your garden work harder for you.
1. Make your own compost
Adding compost to your soil improves plant health and helps to reduce your plants’ supplementary watering requirements. Froma commonsense point of view, why would you put your kitchen and food scraps, and garden refuse, in the council bin and then go out and buy compost? It makes much better sense to make your own.
2. Make your own mulch
If you have a medium to large garden, the garden prunings it can create can be turned into mulch in several ways.
Some gardeners simply throw everything on the ground where they are; others chop up everything with secateurs so that it is in tidier small pieces; some run the mower over their prunings to make mower mulch; others put everything through a power mulcher.
3. Grow you own herbs, vegies and fruits
Even just growing part of your own produce helps to reduce food bills, as buying a bunch of fresh herbs when you only need a small amount leads to wastage of the herbs – and money.
There is sometimes debate about whether growing your own saves you money or not, when the cost of water and the initial investment to set yourself up is taken into account. What this debate forgets is that we grow our own because we want to eat high quality, seasonal, locally grown, organic produce with superior flavour.
The reality is that the cost of growing such produce is far less than the cost of the mass produced, readily available fruit and vegetables which have a huge carbon footprint and food miles attached to them.
Often these fruit and veg are lacking in flavour, having travelled for 1000s of kilometres, been harvested many months ago and are far from organic.
4. Grow your own vegie seedlings from seed
While it may take up to six weeks’ more growing time, sowing seeds into punnets or directly in the ground is definitely cheaper than buying seedlings. For a similar price as a punnet of seedlings, a packet of seeds will give you multiple punnets and usually last a number of years, depending on the variety.
5. Propagate your own plants
You can create an amazing garden on a shoestring budget by growing from seed, getting cuttings or divisions from friends, or buying one plant and propagating more.
If you end up with more young plants than you need, share them with family, friends and neighbours. Garden clubs and plant societies are a great way of sharing knowledge and many also share plants or at least sell them at very affordable prices.
6. Filling raised vegetable beds
Most vegies only need 30cm of soil to grow well, so if you have a raised bed that is 60 or 90cm high, you only need soil in the top 30cm. Filling the whole bed with good quality soil is expensive and a simple solution is to pack bales of straw tightly into the bottom of the bed. Then place your good soil on top to a depth of 30cm.
Over time the straw will become a worm high rise and break down, but it will only drop around 15cm in 18 months. This lowering of soil level allows you to add in more compost and organic matter, which needs to be done each year anyway.
Also, instead of buying a new raised bed, grow vegies in recycled wooden palettes or pots – just make sure it is not chemically treated wood.
7. Start small
In most cases, small plants establish better than larger ones, and usually within a couple of years have outgrown the larger specimens planted at the same time.
It is far better to plant a small plant into soil that you have improved than a larger plant into poor soil. So remember, plant a $1 plant into a $10 hole and it will reward you by growing bigger and stronger.
8. Recycle
Use recycled, salvaged or found objects where you can, creating raised garden beds, wicking beds, water features or worm farms from old baths, and herb and vegie beds from old concrete laundry sinks. Limited only by your imagination, recycling and upcycling does not have to look junky.
You can also create garden art from found objects or old machinery, make scarecrows from old clothes or pots, renew old plant pots with a coat of paint or even mosaic them.
9. Harvest rainwater
This is another area where people often debate whether it justifies the initial investment, however it does provide water security. Having your own water supply to support or supplement your garden allows you to water when and how you choose.
10. Keep plants healthy
Keeping your plants in optimal health by knowing their ideal growing conditions is the best way of preventing challenges.
Plant flowers such as daisies, umbels and those contained in a packet of ‘Beneficial Bug Mix’ to bring in the garden guardians and help to manage pests.
At a time when many households are focused on their budget and the bottom line, finding ways to be thrifty is not only smart, but also often necessary.
So if you are concerned about the cost of living, here are some practical steps to save money and let your garden work harder for you.
Originally published as Cost of living: Save money and grow your own vegies on the cheap