Gardens

What is your Garden Costing You?

It can be a scary exercise to sit down and work out exactly what is spent every year, on the average home gardens and lawns.

Try adding up the costs of Plants, weedicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilisers, petrol, mower and trimmer maintenance, weed eater cord, garden mulch and even water costs. Even the time and effort we go to in order to maintain a good-looking environment for our families and ourselves can amount to a substantial price.

So it is no wonder that many people are looking at ways to save money for more important causes.

One of the first things that you can do to save money, is to make use of as much of that organic matter that many people throw in the bin or wash down the sink.

For instance do you throw out your lawn clippings? Do you dutifully wrap up and throw out those old veggie scraps?

Are you one of those people who regularly get the trailer out and make trips down to the landfill with a pile of branch prunings?

What about those pile of leaves you threw in the bin last autumn?

Do you realise that all of those things can be turned into a wonderful form of plant food, as well as being used as a barrier to prevent the soil from loosing moisture and therefore increasing the amount of time between watering your garden. An organic mulch will also improve the soil structure, increase the good animals like worms while assisting in decreasing the nasty pests living in the soil.

By keeping these sorts of things within your own garden you are also assisting in reducing the effects that city living is having on the environment in landfill problems and costs.

There are a number of different ways that you can recycle these piles of organic matter within your own yard. One is to apply the bulk organic matter directly to your garden beds, ensuring that you don't pile the material directly up against the trunks or main stems of the plants. A second idea to get a worm farm and recycle your kitchen waste that way; the worms provide you with a very strong and nutritious fertilising liquid for the garden as a bonus. This liquid is so strong it has to be diluted 10-1.

Don't, by the way, put meat products, citrus peels or onion and garlic in with the worms. A third way is to purchase or construct your own compost pile/bin/tumbler and recycle the material that way.

So just by composting your old leaves, soft cuttings, veggie and fruit scraps, chipped branches, lawn clippings etc., you can do a lot to reduce your costs that you would have spent on such things as garden mulch and fertilisers as well as assisting your plants to last much longer between watering periods. So as you can see there are a number of reasons for not throwing away all that organic material.

About the Author

The Bare Bones Gardener is a qualified Horticulturist and a qualified Disability Services Worker. He hates spending money on stuff which doesn’t live up to the promises given. So he looks for cheaper, easier, simpler or free ways of doing the same thing and then he passes these ideas on to others.

Garden Blog - http://barebonesgardening.blogspot.com/

Gardens Questions

How do I get Oxalis out of my cactus and succulent potted Gardens?

I live in a very windy desert area and it has spread to several expensive Gardens. I have thought about putting some of the pebbles with white glue next to the plants. What do you think?

Seeing the word 'Oxalis' brought horrid memories flooding back - it is a nightmare!!

We bought an innocent looking pot plant which was so cool because it was a mound and you could stick your finger into it and the 'hole' would disappear. They called it a "Mind your own business" plant.

I put it on the lawn one day to water it and the little yellow flowers popped their evil seeds on the lawn.

A year later it had spread over a thirty square yard area.

I researched, read everything, even went onto a radio gardening programme to ask the experts - spent a fortune but nothing worked.

I would try to remove every sign of them by changing the compost, but if any flowers are there the seeds will pop and spread to the new compost, so chop off all flowers beforehand - do this in a sink or bathtub if possible

Good luck!

Where can I buy crushed granite? It was mentioned on last night's Better Homes and Gardens.?

Names of suppliers in Perth, WA would be great!

Try the website or ask you local nursery or even the yellow pages under landscape or rock or stone.

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