Dirt Cheap Gardening

Horticulture Magazine is starting a new column called “Gardening on the Cheap.” See their first column on starting plants from seed at http://www.hortmag.com/article/startingfromseed.

During this quiet time of the gardening year, I find myself developing a serious case of garden book lust.  If I can’t work in my garden right now, I should at least be drooling over giant glossy garden photos!  Here are a few budget-friendly ways I satisfy my desire for horticultural reading: 

1.  Okay, this is obvious, but I go to the library.  The Multnomah County Library here in Portland has an amazing garden collection and I can stay posted to new books arriving in the collection by subscribing to the RSS feed for new gardening books.  Check your local library for great books on garden topics.

2.  Used bookstores often have extremely reasonably priced gardening titles.  My favorite drop-in and shop bookstore for gardening is the local Goodwill Superstore.  I’ve picked up everything from horticultural classics to recently published hardback coffee-table gardening books for only a few dollars.   Of course large online retailers like Powells and Amazon also have used copies of gardening books for serious discounts.

3.  Host a gardening book and magazine swap with friends.  Because gardening interests change over time, I find that I can usually pull 3 or 4 titles off my shelf that no longer appeal–books on building water features, bonsai, an older edition of the Sunset Western Garden Book, or a book on botanical latin–that would make a great addition to someone else’s library.  I also keep lots of older issues of gardening magazines that I probably will never look at again–but it’s hard to throw them out.  Take the opportunity to share your bounty.  See what your friends are hiding on their bookshelves!

4.  Order seed catalogs.  Okay, so they’re not books, but they provide lots of bedtime reading and good learning opportunities between their covers.  And they fill up your magazine racks.  And they are mostly free!

5.  Watch for sales.  If you have a favorite publisher, check their website frequently or sign up for their e-newsletter to be notified of online sales.  One of my favorite local presses, Timber Press, often offers serious discounts on featured items.  

6.  Buy gardening books through your local garden club or organization.  If you haven’t yet joined a local garden club, consider doing so.  Many gardening organizations are able to offer discounted books and garden supplies to members.  Here in Portland, the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon is one such organization that holds regular book sales to offer discounted books to their members.

7.  Read online.   I know, I hate reading books online.  I want to feel the pages under my fingers.  But you might change your mind once you check out Botanicus.  It’s an amazing digitized library of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden.  Also worth browsing are the digitized titles in the Old Book Library at Earthly Pursuits.

Adding commerically produced compost, manures, and other garden amendments to improve your soil can be quite costly.  And for organic gardeners, caring for the soil and enriching both the nutrient content and the texture, or tilth, are essential for producing abundant crops with fewer disease and pest problems.  So how can the frugal gardener improve soil fertility without shelling out the bucks for bagged amendments?  One way is to make and use your own compost, which I’ll post more on later.  But another really cheap way to improve your soil is through cover cropping.  Cover crops are seed crops grown over garden beds when they’re not being used to grow vegetables or flowers.  There are great cover crops for either cool or warm growing seasons.  Winter cover crops like fava beans, vetch, field peas, and annual grains protect the soil from degrading winter winds and rain, aerate the soil with root penetration, and add nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil when tilled in.  Summer cover crops like Buckwheat can accomplish the same goals, in addition to providing flowers for pollinators and beauty.   For more of an overview of cover crops, see the ATTRA  (National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service) web site.

winter crops of garlic and kale on the left and field peas, vetch and favas on the right as cover crops

Cover crop seed is cheap!  Usually $1-5 per pound.  For a great list of cover crops and their uses and benefits, check out the University of California’s Cover Crop Resource Page.  Cover crop seed is readily available here in Portland at retail nurseries like Garden Fever or Portland Nursery.  Good online sources for seed are Peaceful Valley Farm Supply and Nichols Garden Nursery.

Okay, so you grew a cover crop, now what????  There are several different options for adding the plants to your soil.  One way is to wait until the soil has dried out enough to work in the Spring and then turn the crop under the soil 6-8 weeks before you intend to plant.  In the case of some crops, for instance if your fava beans have gotten tall, you’ll have to chop up the stems to help the plants break down in the soil more quickly.  You could also double dig you beds and add the plant material to the bottom of the trough.  Another method is to cut down the crop and leave it laying on top of the soil and then plant right through it.  It will act as a sheet mulch and eventually add nutrients to the soil.

Since humans began gathering seeds from forest plants and planting them, we’ve also been exchanging those seeds with each other as a form of trade, barter, or food source sharing.  Seed and plant sharing is still a common practice among gardeners and one of the most cost-effective ways to increase the number of plants and foods you grow in your garden!  Never hesitate to ask other gardeners if they have plants they are dividing and would like to part with, or if they have collected seed to share.

Many areas of the country have organized plant and seed exchanges.  In Portland where I garden there are at least two local exchanges–a Yahoo group PDXPlantSwap and the Pacific Northwest Garden Exchange. If you live outside the pacific northwest, check out Garden Web’s list of worldwide plant/seed exchanges. A great national organization for seed saving and sharing is Seed Savers Exchange.  Membership in SSE gives you access to a directory of seed savers from around the world, and it’s an especially great source for rare or heirloom seeds.  

You could also organize a plant or seed swap among your friends and neighbors.  One friend of mine hosts a seed sharing party in the Spring when she’s putting in new Spring crops.  There are always more seeds in a packet then you’ll use that season, so the party is a great way to expand the number of crops without spending more on seeds.  Craigslist and Freecycle are also sources of free plants and garden supplies.

Want big plants fast? This kind of thinking is usually out of reach for dirt cheap gardeners and left to those who can buy mature shrubs and perennials and “install” them into heavily amended soil.   But there are a few annuals that can fulfill this desire for very little cost and breadseed poppies are one of them.

Lauren's Grape Poppy

You might wonder why I’m talking about poppies now, at the beginning of the winter. But this is a great time to scatter breadseed poppy seed (Papaver somniferum) on the ground for spring bloom. They are incredibly easy to grow….just scratch some garden soil a bit where you want them to root and scatter the seed lightly across the ground.  You don’t need to bury or cover the seed and in the Spring you’ll be rewarded with huge plants and spectacular blooms and lovely grey/green lettuce-like foliage. They prefer good drainage and full sun, and are particularly excited about growing in gravel.

This poppy seed was mixed in with Lauren's Grape seed from a gardener friend...what a great surprise!

I used them in a new gravel garden in my parking strip last spring, and although I hadn’t put in many perennials yet, these annual poppies made the garden look full and showy during it’s first season.  Breadseed poppies are not the same as oriental poppies (Papaver orientale) or california poppies (Eschscholzia californica).  They are an annual, grow quite tall (five feet!) and have fat stems and seedpods, and big vegetable-looking leaves.  Plan for them to take up some space, although most of it is vertical, and you can trim off lower leaves to leave light and space for plants beneath them.

Once you sow annual breadseed poppies you will never need to buy seed again.  They produce vast quantities of seed that can easily be collected from the dried pods–enough to supply you and all your friends all the poppies you can grow.  Seed can be hard to find through catalogs, but is usually available through heirloom seed catalogs like Select Seeds.  Ask around to see if any of your friends are growing it or join a group like Seed Savers Exchange or a local Plant Swap group to find seed.  Starts can also be transplanted into the garden in Spring (and I always see them here, both at nurseries and farmer’s markets) but they never do quite as well as those direct seeded, and they cost more!  Annie’s Annuals is a good source of mail-order breadseed poppy plants.

And yes, this is the same plant that produces opium, but it is still legal to grow as long as you aren’t growing vast commercial fields of the stuff.  I did lose a few seedheads (which are highly decorative in their own right) to sidewalk passerby during the growing season, presumably someone who thought they might make some old fashioned morphine.  For a fascinating discussion of the whole poppy growing/opium connection and the politics of gardening check out Michael Pollan’s essay in Harper’s Opium Made Easy.

Have you ever lusted after those cool greenhouse and cloche kits in garden catalogs that cost a fortune? They provide a great way to extend the growing season for summer crops, overwinter cool season crops and start spring crops early. With a little imagination you can use many different cheap or found items as greenhouse and cloche structures. I was at Goodwill the other day and ran across some irrigation tubing–a 50-foot coil of tubing for $3.00. I grabbed it thinking I might use it next summer, but on the way home realized that it would probably work well as a hoop frame for the cloche over my cool season crops.  So off to the hardware store for some plastic sheeting and then home to build the frame. I cut the coil into strips long enough to bend across my four foot bed–pushing both ends into the ground. Then, because my tubing was a little flimsy, I laid a piece of bamboo from my neighbor’s bamboo grove across the top and secured it with duct tape. I cut the plastic sheeting to size and stretched it across, leaving a slit opening on either end that allows me to put the flaps up on warmer days. The whole project cost about $18.00. 

cloche open on a warm day to let in some rain

I also made this small greenhouse from a children’s shade canopy that I found on the clearance table at Walgreen’s for $3.00!  First, I assembled the frame and cover as indicated on the box with the help of my four-year-old daughter and our neighbor Sam.  They played.  Then I convinced my daughter that the garden fairies would prefer a place to hang out for the winter (so clever) and that “we” should create a greenhouse!  No excitement on her part.  But I removed the shade canopy, duct-taped all the joints to make it more sturdy, screwed the base into some scrap boards, and threw plastic over the whole thing.  Voila!  A Greenhouse.  

the greenhouse is not exactly beautiful but it will work....

For other low-cost season extension strategies, check out Gayla Sander’s post on using plastic soda bottles, Aaron Newton’s GroovyGreen article describing cold frames made with old windows and straw bales, and a great DIY hoop house made by Travis Saling using PVC pipe.

Believe me, your neighbors will thank you when you get out there and start raking their leaves. Leaves are a completely free, hugely beneficial addition to your garden. They are full of beneficial bacteria and plant nutrients that are ripe for rotting and adding to your soil. Here are a few ways to use them:

• You can mulch your garden beds in fall by laying a thick layer of leaves around perennials and over bare soil to protect and insulate the soil and increase microbial activity. By Spring, some of the leaves will have rotted and will already be incorporated into the soil.  
• Leaves that remain in the Spring can be added to the compost bin.  
• You can make a beautiful soil amendment called leaf mold by collecting leaves and storing them for about a year. Leaf mold makes an excellent seed starting medium, potting soil amendment, or mulch. There are a few ways to produce leaf mold. The easiest is to create a bin from hogwire or chickenwire and fill it with leaves. If they are dry, wet them down really well when you pack the bin. Then just wait!  In about a year the leaves will turn to a dark crumbly compost. You could also fill paper yard waste bags with leaves, add enough water to make them damp, and close the bags. Punch a few holes in the bag to let in air and check on them periodically during the year to see if they need a bit more water added.  
• Leaves also make a great addition to your regular compost pile as a “brown” or carbon-rich material.
• Mow over leaves on any lawn and leave the shredded leaves to break down and provide fertilizer for the turf.