Growing a Greener World Episode 1004: Gardening on the Cheap

Growing a Greener World is possible in part thanks to the 2019 Subaru Crosstrek Built on a Landfill-Free Planet So You Can Roam the Earth with a Lighter Footprint Subaru Proud Supporter of Growing a Greener World I'm Joel Amble When I Created Growing a

greener

world

My goal was to tell stories of everyday people, innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders, all of them, big and small, dedicated to organic

gardening

and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting habitats natural, making a tangible difference for all of us. They are real, they are passionate, they are all around us, they are the game changers and they are literally

growing

a

greener

world

and inspiring the rest of us to do the same,

growing

a greener world, it is more than a movement, it's our mission, you really know that.

No matter what your hobby is, there are unlimited ways to spend that money and the same goes for

gardening

, but you know what I like. I like to find new ways to save money for this passion of mine and maybe yours too with gardening. grow your garden plants from seeds instead of buying them as plants, all growing on the garden farm started from seeds in winter and I will soon be harvesting what could cost a small fortune to buy in the produce section of the supermarket and Considering that many of the seeds were free to begin with, the savings are even greater.

I'm always looking for ways to save a few dollars when I can, because whether it's what you grow, what you add to the soil, how you choose water or the materials you use to do the job, we all know how easy it is to go overboard on your gardening expenses. , but the bottom line is that there are lots of ways to save money in and around the garden, so today I thought it would be fun to show you a little bit of what I do here at Garden Farm to save money here and you know what else, it's simple things what you can do in this

episode

full of tricks to save money that I'm going to start. with one of my all-time favorite gardening tips that actually sounds like overpaying for something you can get pretty

cheap

.

I'm talking about tomato cages, those cone-shaped wire ones that you can buy for just a couple of dollars each if you're looking at the pennies, they may seem like the perfect choice since they're so inexpensive, but anyone who's ever grown tomatoes and them You know they can bend easily. The basic solder points that hold the wires together break all the time and aren't even tall enough for your tomato plants at full height when they need support the most, so you end up buying new cages over and over again, which is why I do mine with livestock panels from the farm supply store, each one is a 16 foot long heavy gauge steel grate.

Cut each panel with a bolt cutter, bend the wire, place the pieces around the tomato plant and tie two sides with zip ties to make a super sturdy four wall cage, they are tall enough, I have never had a break and at the end of the season They collapse for easy storage now each panel costs about twenty dollars and each panel forms a cage, but a cage like this will easily get you through a decade of growing seasons and probably more and will end up being

cheap

er in the long run. than buying new two dollar cages every spring, while that tip costs a little more up front, the next one is absolutely free, why buy plants at the nursery when you can use the plants you already have to make new ones now in the vegetable patch? be the easiest way I know to make more plants at least with tomatoes and that is to pull off the suckers now, if you don't know what a sucker is, it is that growth that emerges at a 45 degree angle from the main stem on the branch. side is always at 45 degrees and you can see that there is the main stem, the side branch that has that 90 degree angle and there is the shoot and that will be a plant that you can plant in the ground, uproot it in about two weeks and when you remove this shoot of the plant, you don't even need to cut it, you can just pull it off and that's how you do it, all you have to do is get there, get some support if you can and just go ahead and get your thumb in front your index finger behind and turn it Coming to you now all you need to do is root this in a pot with moist soil and then keep it in the shade for about two weeks so you have time to not get stressed because remember it doesn't have roots.

I take out insurance policies all the time to make more plans and if something goes wrong, I have backups of my favorite plants and this is a Sun Gold variety and I have about ten of those. I love Sun Golden here, look at this, this was from the US, I took this a month ago, so this is a sucker that split a month ago and look how much it has grown, it was about the same size, maybe even smaller, but as you can. Look it already has tomato plants so I'm going to put this in its own container to live full time and grow so I have a lot more Sun Gold tomatoes and they look great and it was very easy to make a The main reason my Garden stays so healthy all the time is because of all the attention I put into building good soil, but the best part is that I don't invest a lot of money in it, in fact, I don't have to invest money in it.

As they say, the best things in life are free and that's true in the garden too, my compost, the primary source of all the nutrients my plants need to thrive, is made from ingredients I source from inside my house and from the garden or my local cafe. or grass clippings or our chicken manure, even eggshells, even if you don't have your own chickens, you can usually find small farmers near you who will be happy to share the bounty with you. Poultry manure is high in nitrogen and other nutrients. plants need and when you include bedding material, you have carbon and other nutrients too, even the egg shells break down to add the calcium that all plants need to thrive, with the added bonus of having an incredibly healthy organic garden from the that you are saving all those waste products. go somewhere else, to a landfill, and that's the last thing we need.

If you really want to save money when it comes to mulch and soil products, consider buying in bulk and here's a quick and easy way to evaluate whether buying in bulk makes financial sense. 27 average sized bags of garden soil is one cubic yard and one cubic yard fills half a pickup truck load, so if you need that amount or more it probably makes sense, but now let's do the economics with the math on everything. That, the cost of an average-sized bag of good garden soil, let's say it costs $5 and that's about right, five dollars for twenty-seven bags is one hundred and thirty-five dollars, but that same amount of bulk soil costs only about thirty-five dollars, so there's a hundred dollar savings, but if you don't need half a truckload of mulch or soil or you just like the convenience of bags, don't worry, I get it.

I'm right there with you and I buy the bags quite a bit myself, but you don't need to spend full price, look for the torn bags and a lot of times the box stores have those bags set aside in a separate area just for that very purpose and they usually mark them down. at least half price so look for them but if you don't see them it doesn't hurt to ask the store employees or if you see them on the shelves and they are broken ask because they are usually happy to offload them for you at half price minimum , so that's a win-win and you have nothing to lose and a lot of ground to gain and remember all the hidden costs that come with bagged products, plastic, labor, shipping, fuel consumption, It all adds up, so next time you're looking for a bagged product. product in the nursery consider what it is costing you but also what it is costing the environment there is often a way to get the same material in a way that is much more environmentally friendly and much cheaper sometimes free now buy wholesale Wholesale will definitely save you money on your soil and mulch products, especially instead of bagged products, but how does free sound?

Well, three of my favorite mulches are absolutely free and the first is arborist wood chips. Now I always have one or two piles of work around my property and I love them. Now it's those chips that the tree Services are provided once a tree is taken down and I recently removed some trees on my property so if you have trees down or you have a neighborhood service where someone is taking down some trees you can just come by to those guys and ask them. Tell them if they'll give you those tokens and they'll usually say yes because you're saving them the time and effort of having to deal with them somewhere else and if you have a safe place for them to unload their load, that's really all they need. you care, so it's a good way to do it, but even if you don't find that service in your neighborhood, there is a website called chip drop com where you can register your information and the three companies will go there and look for people in the area where they will be working and if your name is on that list, they will let you know and you might end up with a free pile of wood chips like this, okay, my other favorite source of mulch sheets, a gift from mother nature.

I've mentioned it before, but I really can't say enough about using shredded leaves, so I go around the neighborhood picking up bags of leaves in the fall, load up my truck and bring them back here and I'm shredding them with my leaf trimmer. grass and I'm throwing them in this pile right here and over the winter they're decomposing even more and then it's harvest time, which for me is early to mid. spring, when I'm getting ready to prepare my summer garden and I'm putting my plants in those beds and then along comes this amazing thing called leaf mold or shredded leaf mulch and the texture, the consistency, the way it's easy to spread and the way it decomposes in the soil and in all the worms that come our way.

I could go on and on, but the fact that this is absolutely free and you get a little exercise along the way and then it's one of the best mulches you can use. your garden and it doesn't cost you a cent, that's no bad thing either, the easiest way to make leaf mulch is to rake the leaves in the fall with a mulch trimmer with a bagging attachment. You can also use a regular lawnmower. and then rake the leaves or even run them through a shredder. Some leaf blowers also have a reverse function that sucks the leaves into the machine, finely passes them through the impeller and shoots the finely ground remains into a bag, but the point is that you could even use them whole and let them break down over time, it will take longer. time, you probably won't be able to get them back next season where they break down like that, but if you have a little free time, you don't have to. anything except putting them in a pen like I do and you can even put the bags you use to store the leaves inside because they still decompose and that is also a source of carbon so you don't have to get rid of the bags either.

So you have many options, but definitely try shredded leaf mulch because you will love it. Being smart about the yard work you're already doing can really pay off in terms of free landscaping supplies and shredded leaf mulch in the fall. In fact, the only example is that I end up creating a valuable garden product every time I mow the grass with almost no additional effort. One type of mulch that I like to use periodically is grass clippings, specifically when I've just planted some seeds and I want to give them some protection, a layer of mulch, but protection that's nice and light, so the grass clippings grass clippings work great for that now, I usually do a grass cycle when I mow so the grass clippings come back as organic matter right where I cut them, plus it adds a lot of nitrogen so I don't have to fertilize so much, so it's all good, but sometimes I pick up those clippings and use them as mulch, but this is what happens when you pick them up a lot, the grass is a little wet. or there is condensation inside the hopper and that is the case at the moment, so I have a lot of clippings but they are wet and a little clumpy to work with, so you tried spreading them right now, so I prefer to wait until I dry more straw, like spread them out and that's great but that can take a little bit of time so I have a trick to speed up the process and I'll show you how it works so you can opt for maybe a couple of days to a couple of hours before you can spreading mulch, so the key to using grass clippings quickly is to dry or smoke them and smoke weed and you'reokay in this case and it's really just a matter of heating them up, so I serve them. on some clear plastic, I think it's four mil thick.

I don't know if that really matters much, but I just do an even distribution, the goal is a thin, consistent layer so the trimmings cook evenly and then you just wrap it all in the plastic and that heat will make some of that moisture out. evaporate and then it will make it very dry and straw-like and that's what makes it nice and easy to spread. You can already see the condensation building up inside and yes. that will trap a little bit of moisture, but it will actually draw a lot of that moisture out of the leaves of the grass and that's what I'm looking for and maybe a good seal, pretty good seal right there and then just let it cook in the sun for a few hours , there is no need to turn it, stir it or check it, the heat does the work while you do other things and once you try it with a dull color, it is much easier to pick it up and spread it in the garden wherever you are.

It needs a very light top layer on top of the soil, that scraps mentality puts to good use what others could just as easily throw away and that can really add up to big savings in the garden that feels like something you already have rather than buying it. new, you know, I love taking advantage of all this growing space to grow a lot of different types of foods, certainly vegetables, that's kind of a specialty inside the garden gate, but outside I take advantage of things like blueberries. and raspberries and blackberries, which are easy to grow and it's the perfect place to place these prima canes and flora canes along these rails, but what always bothered me about this is that the way I secured them I don't like them both the rails.

I just end up using orange plastic nylon cord and tie it in place. I don't like the way it looks and it's a bit cumbersome, so I started thinking there has to be a better way. Turns out the best way has been sitting right behind my barn the whole time, you know, those cattle panels. I really like the heavy steel racks so I used to make my own super sturdy tomato cages every time I make a cage. There's a short section left over and I never throw those scraps away, well it just so happens that the remnant is the perfect length to fit between two of my fence posts so I use a pair of bolt cutters to trim the pointy ends on the remnant of the panel, leaving me with a simple, narrow grid, then I fastened one long side of the panel to the top of the fence rail using a spare nail and clips made for coaxial cable or you can hammer U-shaped fence staples now that the grate is securely held in place and I can weave the canes through the openings to keep them pointed against the fence while still allowing natural movement.

The best part is not tying and untying individual canes to the fence, now the key is really installing these pieces before the plant gets too big. grows, you can easily take those unripe pieces and weave them in and out while they are still very flexible a year later, the blackberries are doing very well, my homemade trellises have kept the canes contained in the fence, but still give them plenty of room. to grow they look great and keep the berries within reach for an easy snack while I'm gardening. Honestly, a tip like my blackberry trellises can be one of the most fun and rewarding money savers when you think outside the box and your idea is worth it, sometimes repurposing scrap material into something useful just takes a little imagination and skill with tools.

Our resident DIY, Todd Brock, has another great way to make the most of it without spending a lot of money by using something you probably already have, so if you do enough garden or landscape projects, sooner or later you'll end up with a bunch of these. Now dealing with what you ordered is one thing, 9 times out of 10 you can also deal with what was sent. For most of us, these pallets end up on the side of the house or behind a garden shed, taking up space waiting for us to do something with them and sending them to landfill seems like a complete waste and many sanitation departments won't do it.

It even grabs this if you drag it to the curb with your regular trash picker. Then what do you do? All of this is very good wood most of the time. What we're going to do today is break it down into individual boards and use this wood. To make a window box, breaking down a pallet into usable boards can be done with hand tools if you have a lot of patience. Pallets are built to be strong and sturdy, and trying to remove nails can be a challenge that is simply not worth it. you can spend all afternoon trying to be cautious about it you will end up breaking boards you will end up wasting a lot of construction material that you want to work with the quickest and most fun way to do it power tools a reciprocating motion The saw is a heavy duty tool made for demolition and will chew up the nails quickly.

Controlling the saw and exposed blade as you separate each slat from the deck frame can be an exercise, but when you're done, you should have enough individual boards. to work with, so I have these little pieces of scrap wood, this is just going to be an interior blockage, it's going to be inside the pot, you won't actually see them, it's all going to be buried in the dirt, what it's going to do is it's going to give us a little bit of extra nailing material for a wall and a box of flares, so here again you can use anything if you want to use hammer and nails to do this.

If you want to use screws, you can do it with an air nailer. everything is very fast, you don't see many fasteners, so you don't have to worry about covering those holes. We're seeing a lot of exposed accessories, the nail gun and the air compressor that powers it. You can buy the whole thing for under $200, you'll be surprised how often you use that tool on the back wall of the game box. The same procedure creates the bottom of the planter with wooden slats nailed together via interior locking pieces. There it's really basic, very simple, very rustic, but. that takes a lot of pressure off your shoulders not every corner has to be perfect not every scene has to match perfectly but that's part of the charm of pallet wood the best part of pallet wood is this whole project $0 you already know some Years ago I was involved in a project to try to feed my family of four all summer with all the vegetables they needed and do it for less than $25, but I had to pretend I was a new gardener and didn't have any of the stuff for that. , like seeds, so I put it out into the online universe and started Twitter and asked people if they had free seeds they could send me.

These are people I didn't know, but the next thing I know the seeds are coming in from all over the country, so at the end of the season I had my entire garden planted with everything I needed and I made it for $12 and five cents thanks to that online universe, Twitter was great for that, but I like to use Craigslist, so if I have a particular need and I want to limit it to my community, I can specify those parameters on Craigslist and then I can usually find what I'm looking for for a low cost and Sometimes free, but if I really want free, my favorite source for that online is the free cycle and I love it because you'll connect with people who probably have what you're looking for and also don't want to throw it away and throw it in a landfill. , but they are more than happy to give it to you if you need it so it's a great way to reuse and recycle so the free cycle organization is great for that and then talking about the online communities next door is really good, it's one where you can focus on a close-knit neighborhood or expand a little, but if there are things you want to buy or sell or things you need for free next door, it's great for that and that's the site I use. when I go out in the fall to get all the leaves for my mulch, that's where I put out the SOS and people respond and then I show up and pick up their leaves, so next door there's a really good community group and then of course there's Facebook , which is your online community, those are the people who know you, so if you have a need of any kind, reach out to Facebook, you will likely find what you are looking for to save money in and around the garden. quickly when you save water while providing all your plants with the water they need to thrive.

Efficient watering is achieved when you give your plants only the water they need and only where they need it. Drip irrigation kits and systems are a small initial investment, like a kit like this one for about $40 that includes everything you need to water many containers or plant beds using drip irrigation so the water gets right where you want it. You want just the right amount to keep your plants strong even during the hottest summer. generous layer of leaf mulch or other type of mulch and you will save money and water for years to come and one more thing: it's hard to save money when you have a broken hose, they are expensive.

Have you checked the prices? Those lately, especially for quality products, but sooner or later you're going to cut it, break it, or run over it with a lawnmower and break it in half like I did, but it happens to all of us, but most of the time . just go out and buy a new hose instead of trying to repair it and that's a shame because there are so many parts you can get today for the front, the back or the middle when you go over it with the grass. lawnmower Now, if you find that your host just doesn't want to use that coupler because the plastic is too rigid, we'll have a trick to show you, all you need to do is boil some water and submerge that rubber part. in that boiling water for a few seconds, take it out and then try to get it going and then you secure it with the clamp and that's it, that's it.

I hope you found some ways to save money in your garden today, but if you want to come back and watch this

episode

again or find more information on our website, that address is the same as the name of our show, Growing a Greener World calm. I'm Joel Ampel, thank you for joining us all and See you here next time to continue growing in a greener world. Now you can continue learning about gardening online and courses for me, Joel Amplio, in my online gardening academy, classes are designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to mastering the skills.

Courses available right now plus new topics that cover everything you need to know to grow as a professional Take each class on your own time from anywhere plus you'll have opportunities to ask me questions about your specific garden in real time Go to Joe Gardner dot -com/learn for more details today