Saving Some Green: Low-Cost Ways To A Beautiful Garden

North Canton Gardner Anna Wincze has many penny-pinching tips for gardners. Among them are: using water with egg shells soaking in it for fertilizer (pictured), growing companion plants that control insects, growing from seed, growing vegetables mixed with flowers, making compost, growing herbs year-round and dead-heading for potpouri.



Annie Wincze stretches the life of her gardening dollar by planting her garden with a combination of multi-purpose vegetables, flowers and herbs.

Kale and lettuce serve as edible borders. Flowers such as Johnny-Jump-Ups, violets, nasturtiums and calendula double as edible salad treats.

And she plants companion plants that naturally fight pests. "Nasturtiums are great," says Wincze, owner of Blumen Laden, a floral-design shop in the Collinsville section of Canton. "I use them as a border; they're low and lush. The flowers are beautiful for salads. And they're good companion plants if you have a plant that is susceptible to aphids. They attract aphids on the underside of their leaves, and the aphids don't hurt the nasturtiums."

By nature, gardeners tend to be generous, often sharing gardening advice and their perennial and vegetable surplus. These traits can be the roots of thrift that flower into free and low-cost gardening opportunities.

For starters, gardeners who compost have free fertilizer handy. Mixed into the soil when planting, compost serves as a slow-release fertilizer.

And throughout the growing season (and spring and fall for bulbs), top-dressing with compost and working it into the soil gives gardeners an ideal free, organic fertilizer, says Tom Rathier, soil scientist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station's Valley Laboratory in Windsor.

"If you have a good compost, you may not need any other fertilizer," he says.

Many municipalities offer residents free compost from their town's leaf collection.

Wincze makes her own fertilizer by chopping up egg shells and seeping them overnight in a water-filled mason jar. Less appealing, but highly effective, is her horse manure fertilizer: She puts fresh or aged manure into a cloth bag, soaks it in water overnight and mixes that manure water with three parts fresh water.

Check farms and Craigslist.org for free manure. Some coffee shops, like Starbucks, give away free coffee grounds.

One of the cheapest ways to add to your garden is to swap perennials with friends and neighbors.

If you don't have enough to swap, buy low-cost perennials at local garden club plant sales, where members sell plants donated from their gardens.

"If someone is giving it away, it's because it grows all over the place," says master gardener Bonnie Lombardi, curator of gardens for the Simsbury Historical Society and a member of the Simsbury Garden Club.

And stretch what you already have: Lombardi divides her own perennials and plants them elsewhere in her garden, which speeds their growth.

"I just redid a whole area of my garden in hosta. I kept dividing and dividing it," she says. "They're healthier that way."

Overwintering annuals is another popular money-saving practice. Lombardi uses a variety of methods, depending on the plant. "There's always ways to be cheap," she says.

"I take variegated vinca vines out of the pot and plant them in the yard for the winter," she says. They survive in the ground and can be repotted in the spring.

She'll take cuttings of sweet potato vines, put them in water until they root, plant them in soil and keep them in a sunny window through the winter.

Coleus, which can be pricey, "makes a great house plant," she says. She brings hers in for the winter. To overwinter geraniums or warm-climate plants like fuchsia, some gardeners keep them in a sunny window and water and fertilize them like a houseplant. Others keep them in the dark in the basement so they go semi-dormant.

Annuals can be brought into a sunny area of the house from mid-March to mid-April, says horticulturist Ron Pitz, interim executive director of the Knox Parks Foundation in Hartford.

Start watering them, and when the leaves appear, start to feed them, he says. They should be ready to go back outside by late May.

Growing from seeds costs about one-fifth the expense of growing from vegetable or flower seedlings. To spend even less, gardeners harvest seeds from their plants and save them for the following year.

Another great way to get free seeds is to swap leftover seeds with friends and neighbors. Seeds are fine past their official sale date, says Pitz. Seed companies donate seeds at the end of the planting season to the Knox Parks Foundation. "We give those away to community gardeners the following year," Pitz says. "They're perfect. There's nothing wrong with them." Any decrease in yield is minimal, he says.

If you're buying seeds, he suggests, wait until they go on sale,and use them the following year.

Bargain hunters also can buy vegetable plants and annuals at a reduced rate in June, when garden centers and big box stores cut prices, Pitz says. As long as the roots are healthy, he says, you can plant a wilting or overgrown plant deeply so it stands up straight.

Frugal gardeners dry their herbs and use them year-round, but the process doesn't always work for those who are new to it. Virgulto heard of one woman who chops up her parsley and freezes it with water in ice-cube trays. She adds the seasoned ice cubes as she's making tomato sauce in the cooler months.

Wincze turns her dead flowers and excess herbs into potpourri that she gives as holiday gifts. And after she harvests the leaves, she uses the woody rosemary stems as skewers. That's frugal nirvana: functional and flavorful.