Thrifty ways to nifty garden creations
Better Homes and Gardens' resident landscaper, Jason Hodges, shares his top tips for creating an expensive-looking garden on a budget.
I love my garden and every chance I have I add to it and tweak it to improve the way it looks and feels, the way I use it and to have people admire it. I’m told all the time, “It’s OK for you, you know what you’re doing and we just don’t have a big budget.”
Well, either do I. Like everyone else I extended myself to buy into a Sydney suburb and had next-to-no money to spend on the garden. I had to beg, borrow and scrounge to give my garden a start. Then I added to it over the years. The best thing about a garden built on a tight budget is that it’s a reflection of you and your personality much more than one built by a professional.
Buying seconds or from Gumtree, eBay or scrounging at the local tip and council clean-ups are great ways to get your creative juices flowing. But you need a game plan otherwise you’ll end up accumulating things you’ll never use.
Find a garden that inspired you and try to identify which elements you love. If it’s a timber screen for example, start accumulating all the timber you can get your hands on. Old fence palings fixed in different ways make great feature walls that will require much less maintenance than a screen built from expensive new decking.
I reckon if you asked every home owner you knew if they had any plants they wanted removed from their garden, 90 per cent would have something to offer. I’m not talking about a 30-metre gum but plants that could be dug out and used in your garden. Free plants for you and a problem solved for your friend.
Cuttings are another way of building a garden for free. I have more than 500 Buxus Japonica in my garden. In a 100-millimetre pot they retail for about $8.50, which adds up to $4250 but by doing the cuttings myself I’ve spent about $20 on potting mix and grown them all myself. Succulents are the quickest and easiest plants to strike for beginners. Snap them off, stick them in some sand and they’ll never look back.
A quick, fun and easy project for all ages is to give pots a facelift with leftover paint. If your pots are a mishmash of colours, textures and sizes you can tie them together with paint. Pots clustered together with a theme look interesting. I like to start with my base colour and then tint it lighter for each pot. If I start with a black pot I’ll add white for the next pot, and for white for the next, shading it lighter for each pot.
Soak terracotta pots in water for an hour in the morning and paint them in the afternoon to get nice, even coverage with water-based paint.
Where money is no object, paths and high-traffic areas in a garden are paved, concreted, tiled or decked but on a budget, you can still have paths, steppers and entertainment areas by using crushed granite, gravel and even blue metal (which is an aggregate that plumbers use to back-fill trenches) works well and can soften the look of a new garden. Gravel is cheap starting about $50 a tonne but used wisely, it can cover a lot of path.
I watch my garden grow and see how my family enjoys it and I receive complements from everyone that visits but I know that it’s achievable for all home owners. You have to start somewhere. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Written by Jason Hodges. First appeared on Domain.com.au.
Related links:
How to have a garden when you’re a renter
Plants that will make your home happier
Everything you need to know about fertilising your plants