Your garden is more than just a source of a color and a place to spend time with family and friends. A good garden is a statement, telling visitors exactly what you’re about and what you value. If you want a lush, luxurious garden, and find it outside your means, you might be at a loss for how to make your backyard shine. Here are five suggestions for gardening methods that will keep your garden looking its absolute best, on a budget.
Start with Seeds
Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to landscaping and gardening. Finding the perfect exotic plants is one thing, but getting them into your garden is another. If they’ve been grown and cultivated and pampered on a farm already, they’re going to cost a lot. Growing them yourself, on the other hand, is a great way to save – you’re just buying seeds and soil and paying for the water. You can get the seeds online or locally, and it gives you a chance to really plan out your colors in advance.
Biodegradable Seed Pots
Biodegradable seed pots can be made of all kinds of things – sometimes its recycled paper, but sometimes they can be made of old newspapers, too. Just make sure whatever you pick doesn’t have any harmful chemicals for your soil, and don’t use anything that is coated in plastic or other toxic materials. Using a biodegradable seed pot to build your garden means you can set it and forget it in the garden bed, and as the pot breaks down, it just feeds your seeds.
Mulch Ado About Nothing
Some people spend a lot of money on expensive fertilizers to keep their gardens growing at peak efficiency, but mulching is a great way to use stuff that is sitting around – and that you might be able to get from neighbors – to keep your luxury garden gleaming. Typically, you’ll use two to three inches of wood shreddings, birch chips, dried leaves or brown compost particles around trees and shrubs that are already growing, which insulates roots, saves water and can prevent unwanted plants from growing.
Use Citrus
If you need to repel pests from your luxury garden – and you will – go the natural route with citrus peels and banana peels. They will repel things like ants, mosquitoes, aphids, and whiteflies. You can also use other fruit peels like apple, pomegranate and mango to feed your plants. Soak any peels overnight in water, and then spray them on the parts of plants affected by pests.
Go Indigenous
Finding handsome luxury plants could be as simple as using indigenous plants for your garden. Some of them will have the brilliant colors, low maintenance and volume to help build your garden up while also supporting your local ecosystem. Any local plants you keep will help balance out the other wildlife and keep certain luxury plant species thriving. You’re bound to save more money using indigenous plants than imported ones.
