7 Realistic Ways to Save Money in the Garden

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Folks like to poke fun at gardeners for the amount of money they spend on supplies to grow food. The gardeners themselves will confess it, too:

“I spent *insert triple dollar amount* this year to grow fifteen tomatoes.”

If you look at the prices for soil, fertilizer, containers, etc. and do the math, you’ll see it’s pretty easy to spend more on your garden than what you’d pay to just buy that food from the grocery store in the first place. And these days, garden supply prices are at an all-time high.

To be clear, if your goal isn’t saving money on food, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some of us garden for therapy (emotional support plants, anyone?). Some of us like to know how our produce was treated. Several notorious documentaries released in the last few decades exposed that the “organic” industry isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. And, of course, everybody who’s tried one knows a homegrown tomato is ten times better than a gas-ripened one that’s been on a truck for a week!  

With all that said, if you’re trying to garden for self-sufficiency, tallying up the expenses can be disheartening. But there are a handful of ways to cut costs, for gardeners looking to save on their grocery bill. Really, most of them are just downright practical for anybody!

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1. Consider Growing In-Ground Instead of Raised Beds or Containers

A lot of new gardeners get the idea their native soil is a lost cause, if it’s hard and clay-heavy, rocky, or covered in lawn grass and thickets of roots. If they’re not able to till or plow it, they assume the only option is to install raised beds and fork over the money to fill them up with soil.

Truth is, most native soils have a lot to offer with a little TLC, even if it’s far from perfect. And you don’t need any heavy equipment to prep it for planting. You can take a no-till approach, which will improve the soil over time with the help of beneficial soil organisms.

You’ll need some natural mulch such fall leaves, wood chips, or straw to start a new no-till garden space. These are pretty easy to get your hands on for free or cheap in many areas. Compost also benefits the no-till process, but you can get by with a lot less than what it’d take to fill large raised beds.

The biggest caveat with a no-till approach is that it takes months to years to make noticeable changes in the soil. If you’re looking to plant sooner than that, you can speed up the process by removing the grass/thatch and breaking up the top several inches of soil with a handheld tool. A garden claw and a broad fork will get the job done. These tools are also good for aerating the soil as needed without tilling, so they’re a worthwhile investment.

Here’s some more detail on the process we used to get some really sad ground into planting shape over one season: Turning a Neglected Lawn Into a Productive Garden With No-Till Methods.

If you’re really concerned about the quality of your native soil, consider planting less picky crops in the ground, and save your raised bed space for soil-sensitive crops like carrots, onions, and other root vegetables. Tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumbers, cabbage, beans, and many other crops do well even in heavier native soils.

Read this post for more about the benefits of planting in-ground instead of raised beds, plus a few tips for dealing with some of those problems you might be worried about with in-ground gardening: 3 Reasons NOT to Build Raised Beds for Your New Garden.

2. Don’t Buy Bagged Potting Soil for Raised Beds/Containers

If you’re going the raised bed or container route, what you choose to fill them with will drastically affect your total startup costs. Bagged potting soil or “raised bed soil” may be quick and easy to get ahold of, but that $10 to $12 per bag adds up fast. You’ll be surprised how many bags it actually takes when you’re filling a raised bed for the first time.

When you buy bagged soil, you’re often paying for convenience and a brand name, not necessarily quality. I figured those pretty pink bags sold as “organic raised bed soil” would be worth the extra money, when I built my first two raised garden beds. Unfortunately, that mix was full of green wood chips, which caused problems in the long run. It took about two years for all the wood to break down enough I could grow productive plants in those beds.

Even if you pay a premium for top-tier potting soil (the $18 – $25 a bag kind), it’s still probably not the best option for raised garden beds and large planters. Potting soil is designed with smaller containers in mind; most mixes contain additives meant to hold water. Raised beds don’t dry out nearly as fast as a little pot, and the potting soil can stay wet for too long and waterlog your plants’ roots.   

What to do instead:

Rather than spending half a paycheck on fancy potting soil that likely won’t even serve your plants best, you can save a ton by opting for a simple 1:1 mix of compost and regular topsoil.

At the time of writing this, some good bagged topsoil will run you about $3 to $5 per bag, and generic mushroom compost costs roughly $5 to $7 per bag, depending on location. Throw in some worm castings, some perlite for drainage, or other amendments, and you’ll probably still come out spending less than you would’ve on brand-name potting soil.

Bagged topsoil and compost are a fine place to start, for a new raised bed or two. But really, buying in bulk is where the real savings are, which leads to the next point:

3. Buy Soil Products in Bulk

Buying top soil, compost, peat, or other soil products in bulk is usually the most cost-effective route, especially if you have a big garden or more than a couple raised beds to fill. Most local landscape companies sell compost and topsoil by the truckload or cubic yard. As a bonus, you’ll often get a better-quality product when you buy soil or compost from local businesses instead of home improvement stores.   

Whenever you buy soil by the truckload or cubic yard, ask and make sure it’s topsoil meant for the garden and landscape, not fill dirt. In some cases, the terms “fill dirt” and “topsoil” may be used interchangeably. Fill dirt is meant for leveling. It tends to be full of debris and subsoil from grading sites, which isn’t ideal for growing things in.  

4. Start From Seed: It’s Not Hard!

Depending on where you buy them, transplants for the garden range from $3 to $4 for a little four pack to as much as $5 or $6 per individual seedling. In comparison, seed packets cost around $3 to $5 for enough seeds to start dozens of plants! Most seeds also stay viable for at least several years, so a single seed packet can last you multiple seasons.

To start your transplants from seed indoors, you’ll need to invest in some basic supplies up front. Think trays, containers, and grow lights. Once you’ve got that out of the way, all you’ll need to pay for each season is any seeds you want to add to your collection and some seed-starting mix. A good water-soluble fertilizer also helps to turn out healthy seedlings. I’ve found that a single bottle will last for several years, since it doesn’t take much to feed tiny plants.

If you want to grow a lot of different things in your garden, starting from seed is much cheaper than loading the car down with seedling flats every spring. To cut costs even more, you can learn to save your own seeds for next year, from any open-pollinated veggie varieties you grow.

Seed-starting may seem a little intimidating for newer gardeners. But those little plants want to grow, and it’s not nearly as hard as you’d think to keep them alive and thriving. It’s also a lot of fun. Once you start, you’ll be sacrificing a whole room in your house for your seedlings in no time.

Here’s some more help with starting your own transplants indoors from seed:

No-Fuss Supply List for Indoor Seed Starting

15 Indoor Seed Starting Mistakes You Can Prevent or Correct

Beginner’s Guide to Seed Shopping: How to Pick Seeds for Your Garden

5. Make Your Own Fertilizer Blends

A lot of our staple annual veggies are fast-growing heavy feeders that produce a better harvest with some added fertilizer. In our garden, we get the best results when we side-dress our plants with some organic fertilizer at least a couple times during a season.

A little bag of balanced organic fertilizer for $15 doesn’t really break the bank if you just need one. That single bag might even last you a couple years, with a small garden. Once you start expanding your garden for more intensive food production, though, you’ll be dropping more money when you run out halfway through the first feeding!

Organic fertilizer blends contain things like bone meal, feather meal, blood meal, alfalfa, and sulfate of potash to provide important nutrients for plants. Instead of buying a complete fertilizer blend, you can cut costs quite a bit by sourcing those ingredients separately. You’ll often find them for a better price per pound that way, especially if you opt for value-sized bags.

Targeting Your Fertilizer Needs:

DIYing your fertilizer blend also allows you to take a more targeted approach. That way, you’re not paying for anything you don’t need. You can get a basic, inexpensive soil test through your county agricultural extension office to find out what nutrients are already available in your soil.

We know our soil already has an abundance of phosphorous and a moderate amount of potassium. That means we mainly need to focus on nitrogen when we fertilize. We use blood meal for a nitrogen source and add some sulfate of potash for plants that need a lot of potassium, like tomatoes and peppers.         

There are a ton of places (online and brick and mortar) where you can find organic fertilizer ingredients. Your local co-op or feed and seed store is a great place to start, since they tend to have lower prices than big box stores.

We can get a 3 lb bag of blood meal for $10, at the co-op. That easily covers a whole year, since each plant only needs a few teaspoons at a time. A big (50 lb) bag of naturally-derived sulfate of potash runs us about $30 and will last us many seasons.

As long as you keep them in a cool, dry place out of direct sunlight, most dry organic amendments will stay good for a long time.

6. Start Composting at Home

Compost improves soil quality and provides important nutrients and trace minerals for your plants, whether you grow in raised beds or in the ground. It’s especially helpful for a no-till system, since it boosts beneficial microbes and fungi in the soil. High-quality compost comes with a decent-sized bill, though, especially if you need enough to spread on a bigger garden each year.

To offset that cost, it’s never a bad idea to start your own compost pile. Even if you can’t realistically produce enough compost to cover all your needs, every contribution counts.

A lot of folks have told me they just don’t have the time to deal with turning a compost pile all the time. Here’s the thing, though: you really don’t have to. Sure, you can make finished compost in six weeks if you micromanage your greens and browns and turn it religiously every three days. But even if you don’t, you’ll still end up with compost. It’ll just take a bit longer.

“Cold composting” means you just throw scraps and biodegradables in the pile and let them break down without intervention. There’s nothing wrong with that. It might be six months to a year before that pile becomes dark, crumbly gold, but compost still happens whether we poke at it or not.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to managing the compost. I like to stack mine like a lasagna: add a layer of greens (kitchen scraps, grass clippings, coffee grounds), then cover it with a layer of browns (shredded leaves, wood chips, shredded cardboard). If I’m not super busy, I might turn it before I empty my kitchen scrap bucket.

Sometimes, I don’t turn the compost for weeks. Keeping a layer of browns on the top prevents the pile from stinking when I’m not fooling with it much. I usually get finished compost within 3 or 4 months doing it this way, except in the winter when microbe activity slows down.

7. Grow Cover Crops

Cover crops aren’t just for large farming operations. You can use them in a smaller garden (even raised beds) to reduce the amount of inputs your soil needs to grow healthy crops.

Cover crops can scavenge and fix nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, boosting their levels in your soil. They also provide convenient mulch, and the decomposing crop residue adds organic matter to improve the soil structure. A smart cover crop strategy can significantly reduce the amount of compost and fertilizer you have to buy to keep your soil in good shape from season to season.

We like to grow cowpeas and buckwheat as a late summer cover crop once our warm-season crops are done. We then chop and drop them for mulch and nutrients for our fall crops; that way, we don’t need to bring in more mulch to replace what was lost over the summer.

Cover crops are particularly helpful for your finances if you don’t have access to a lot of free or cheap mulch and/or compost.

Here’s how to choose the right cover crop(s) and use them to their full potential: How to Plan and Plant Cover Crops to Improve Your Garden Soil.

Regardless of your purpose in having a garden, there’s no need to let the expenses that come along with it ruin the enjoyment, especially if you’re just getting started. You’ll find the baseline over time for what inputs you truly need to get good yields. Still, it’s never a bad idea to save a few dollars here and there, when you can.