What are some hints for gardening on the cheap? Quality tools, expert advice and shopping early in the season will keep the green on your thumb and in your wallet! Invest in quality tools. That's a good...
Invest in quality tools. That's a good one. If you're looking at an $8 tool that you're going to break three of, versus a $15 tool that's going to last, the cheapest thing you can get is not the best. I think everybody has experienced this in life. For most people, we don't really need "the best," we don't need "top-of-the-line." If gardening is something you're going to do a few weekends a year and you just want your yard to look nice, there's no reason to go out and buy a $90 shovel. But if you buy a $5 shovel, the chances that you'll break it the first time you use it are pretty good. So invest in decent, quality tools.
Also, if you shop at the right time, in the early part of spring, you can get small plants that will grow to be very nice, large plants in a relatively short time. This is particularly true of perennials. Our society tends to be kind of "instant gratification," but I would say that you can get a very small plant early in the season and it will grow into a nice plant relatively quickly. When it comes to buying your plants, save your money for either investing in larger trees for shade or for plants that are prone to growing slowly. For example, here in Central Texas, we have the mountain laurel - a beautiful native shrub, a very hardy plant and an excellent plant to put in a landscape - but it has a tendency to grow pretty slowly. So, all things being equal, I would put more money toward buying a bigger mountain laurel because they grow so slowly, and then spend less money on other perennials that will grow pretty fast.
The biggest money saving tip, though, is to go talk to someone who knows what they're doing before you spend a lot of money on something and just kill it! Almost everybody that's done any sort of gardening has had a bad experience and they've killed some plants. And that's going to happen. Everybody I know, and I know people that have been gardening their whole lives, has killed something. You always kill some plants. If 100 percent of everything you plant lives, you've beaten all the odds! You should be able to get a 95-96 percent success rate. But if you just go out and by the first things you see that you think are really pretty and you don't know what you're doing, you can throw a lot of money into a garden and not really get anything back out of it other than a very short period of bloom. We do carry those kinds of things because some people will decide to have a party and they want their yard to look fabulous, but two hours after the party, they don't care what it looks like. But they want it to look fabulous for when people are there. So we have things to suit their needs. But we do make sure to tell them, "This is gorgeous now, but you've got two weeks and then it's done."
So get good advice, know what you're getting into and spend your money wisely as far as purchasing plants that are going to perform well. We always try to make our customers as successful as possible because if they're not successful, they're not going to know that maybe the plant they bought wasn't the right plant for what they were doing or that it had this inherent flaw they didn't know about. They're just going to think they don't know how to garden and they're never going to want to garden again because they've thrown all this money at it. So it's very important to us that they're successful at gardening. That way they're happy, they're going to want to garden more and they're going to come back and be repeat customers. It's a win for them, it's a win for us. And that's what we try to do.
