9 Ways to Save Money in the Garden 💸

I don't know about you, but I sometimes spend a little too much here in the garden. So in this video we're going to give you nine of our best money saving tips that still give you incredible bang for your buck. Our first tip might sound a little too obvious, but trust me when I say the simple things make the difference. Starting your own seeds versus buying transplants. Now I'm a fan of both methods, but you simply can't beat the cost savings of starting your own seeds. I paid about $5 for this pack of corn seed. There are hundreds and hundreds of corn seeds in here. Whereas if I were to buy a six pack at the nursery, I'm probably paying $4 just for those six. Now I do get them a little faster, but still all these varieties here, hard to find at a nursery, easy and cheap to grow from seeds. Fertilizing your garden can actually get pretty expensive. And one of the things that we always do in the garden is take a bunch of prunings. So rather than constantly trying to buy or bring in as many amendments as you can from outside, what I like to do is take all my clippings and actually compost them. So over here I have a nice, simple, cheap compost bin. You add your fresh cuttings in and you want to make sure that you always have a fresh source of carbon. In this case, I really like using straw. You just come in, cover up your fresh clippings. A few months, you'll have a wonderful amendment that helps build your soil, increase the life of your soil, get healthier plants, and you'll save a lot of money. I am a huge fan of buying plants once and having them come back year after year in the garden. And that really is the beauty of investing in perennial plants. So if I, A, know that I really want this plant in the garden, B, I have the right conditions for it to thrive and C I'm in the right hardiness zone. Meaning that this plant isn't going to succumb to my winter's coldest temperatures. Then I am bound to be able to enjoy this beautiful plant for many seasons to come. Now with perennials, they usually do cost more than annuals as this upfront cost. But over time, once it establishes in your garden, the plants will fill out and they will come back reliably with lots of blooms and possibly fruit. So really over time, you are saving money by not needing to buy annual plants year after year. My second money saving tip is actually growing the same plant twice. Believe it or not, you can do this with many different crops, including this little pepper right here. This is a fish pepper. It's one of my favorite variegated peppers. But the interesting thing is I grew this last year successfully. I then cut it back about two thirds, pulled it out of the ground, put it in a pot, stored it in a protected area for the winter, and then put it right back into this Birdies tall round bed and take a look. It's growing like crazy and we're getting all sorts of wild and delicious peppers out of this. So check our video out on this and explore overwintering. It doesn't work with every plant, but if you can grow the same plant twice, you just saved a bunch of money. When I first started building this garden, I did it with whatever I had available to me. One of those things was actually tree branches from a tree that I cut down. And that's actually how I built the first fence for my garden. So I'm always trying to repurpose. I'm always trying to build stuff on my own because when it comes to gardening, it can add up, it can get a little expensive. And I highly recommend you guys, always try to build your own structures. So in this case, I have this cucumber trellis. If I were to try to buy this commercially, it would probably cost in the realm of a hundred, $200, but as simple as two tree stakes and a two by two, I could build a trellis for something like $25, $30. If you look around my garden, I have these kinds of funny structures all over the place, including right back there, where I just have a piece of condiment on top of two tree stakes. So just try to save money whenever you can by DIYing and building your own structures. You've probably seen a number of how to's on making more plants with the existing plants you have. And even from kitchen scraps. Now, if you've never tried vegetative propagation or cloning before, it can save you a lot of money and it can be a lot of fun. So with many of the perennial plants, you can propagate from leaves stems and even roots, as long as you have a bit of know-how and you just keep practicing. And some of the techniques include division, meaning like you rip up the base of the plant and you create brand new instant plants. Or you can try layering where you're trying to encourage more roots to grow out of something like a stem. And the most common one is cuttings where you try to get roots to show up here and then you get your plant. If you get really good at cloning, you may be able to make money by selling your little plants. My final tip, I confess is maybe the most annoying for myself to actually practice and preach. And it is to have a plan in the garden. I cannot tell you how many times, whether it's a tomato or a fruit tree, I got a little excited at the nursery. I bought something. I did not have a plan for where it was going to go. And then what happened to it? I did not plant it in time and it either became root bound or it died. And so that was just a pure waste, not only of money, but of my own time. So make sure you spend a little time before you go out and purchase things so you know exactly what you're going to do with them so you don't waste any money. One of the hardest things to learn as a gardener is how to actually be patient. It's extremely tempting to go to the nursery, buy the biggest tree that you could find, but they often cost 50, 60, a hundred dollars for a single tree. Instead you could save your money and find a small tree like this one right here that I only got for $10, pot it up over the course of a year and you'll end up with a tree like this, which is exactly how this tree started in a little pot, just like this. So it just takes a little bit of time and you could save hundreds of dollars over the course of your gardening career. For example, this passion fruit right here is just a single plant that I put in the ground a year ago and now it's taken over the entire trellis and it's giving me hundreds of passion fruits. So a little bit of time upfront, we'll save you hundreds of dollars in the long run. Over the years, I've saved a lot of money by sharing materials and swapping seeds, seedlings, and really cool plants with local gardening friends. So instead of holding onto a whole bunch of bulk materials or seeds that I probably can't use before all of that stuff goes bad, I trade them. And by trading, I learn about the different varieties that other people are growing. There are also a whole bunch of seed exchange libraries and events. So go up there and find that community and just chat with other gardeners local to your area. That way you learn about what works, what doesn't. You can save money that way. And that connection piece to the community alone, that is priceless. Because you're still here watching this video, I have one final tip for you. And it is, if you're going to buy something guys, buy quality. You don't want to have your fifth set of pruners in your third year of gardening. Trust me, I've done it myself. So here at Epic, we have our own store where we hand select pretty much everything you see in this video right here. The highest quality stuff shipped from our warehouses directly to your door. Because we know you have to buy quality if you're going to spend money in the first place. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.