- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

[bouncy guitar music] You know, it really doesn't matter what your hobby is, there are unlimited ways to spend that money and the same is true with gardening, but you know what I like?

I like to find new ways to save money for this passion of mine and maybe yours too with gardening, like growing the plants in your garden from seed instead of purchasing them as plants.

Everything growing at the Garden Farm was started from seed in winter and soon I'll be harvesting what could cost a small fortune to buy from the produce section of the grocery store, and when you consider that many of the seeds themselves were free to begin with, the savings are even greater.

I'm always looking for ways to save a few bucks when I can because whether it's what you grow, what you add to the soil, how you choose to water, or the materials you use to get the job done, we all know how easy it is to go overboard on your gardening expenditures.

But the bottom line is, there are a lot of ways to save money in and around the garden so today I thought it would be fun to show you a little bit of what I do here at the Garden Farm to save money right here, and you know what else?

It's simple things that you can do too.

In this episode full of money saving tricks, I'm going to start with one of my all time favorite gardening tips that actually sounds like overpaying for something you can get pretty cheaply.

I'm talking about tomato cages.

Those cone shaped wire ones you can pick up for just a couple of bucks a piece, if you're watching pennies they may seem like the perfect choice since they're so inexpensive, but anyone who's grown tomatoes in them knows they can bend easily, the basic spot welds holding the wires together break all the time, and they're not even tall enough for your tomato plants at full height, when they need support the most.

So you end up buying new cages over and over again, that's why I make my own out of livestock panels from the farm supply store.

Each one is a 16 foot long grid of heavy gauge steel.

I cut each panel down with bolt cutters, bend the wire, fit the pieces around the tomato plant, and lash two sides together with zip ties to make a super sturdy four walled cage.

They're plenty tall enough, I've never had one break, and at the end of the season they collapse down for easy storage.

Now, each panel costs about $20 and each panel makes one cage, but a cage like this will easily get you through a decades worth of growing seasons and probably more, and end up being cheaper in the long run than buying new $2 cages every spring.

While that tip costs a little extra upfront, this next one is absolutely free.

Why buy plants at the nursery when you can use the plants you already have to make new ones?

Now in the vegetable garden, there may be the easiest way that I know of to make more plants at least with tomatoes and that's to root out suckers.

Now if you don't know what a sucker is, it's that growth that emerges at a 45 degree angle from the main stem and the side branch.

It's always at 45 degrees and you can see there's the main stem, the side branch, that's that 90 degree angle, and there is the sucker.

And that's gonna be a plant you can put in the ground, root it out in about two weeks, and when you take this sucker off the plant you don't even need to cut it out, you can just snap it off and here's how you do it.

All you do, is you reach in there, get some support if you can, and just go ahead and get your thumb in front, your forefinger behind it, and snap it towards you.

Off it comes.

Now all you need to do is root this into a pot of moist soil and then keep it in the shade for about two weeks so it has time to not stress out because remember it doesn't have any roots.

I take insurance policies all the time to make more plants and if something goes wrong I've got backups for my favorite plants and this happens to be a Sungold variety and I have about 10 of those in here.

I love Sungold, and look at this.

I took this a month ago so this is a sucker that was snapped off a month ago and look how much it's grown, it was about the same size, maybe even smaller, but as you can see it already has tomato plants on it.

So I'll be getting this into its own container to live full time and grow out so I've got a lot more Sungold tomatoes and those are looking great and it was so easy to do.

A big reason my garden stays so healthy all the time is because of all the attention I put into building great soil, but the best part?

I don't put a lot of money into it.

In fact, I don't have to put any money into it.

As they say, the best things in life are free, and that's also true in the garden.

My compost, the primary source of all the nutrients my plants need to thrive, is made from ingredients I get from inside my house and around the landscape or from my local coffee shop or the grass clippings or our chicken manure.

Even the egg shells.

Even if you don't have your own chickens you can usually find small farmers near you who will be happy to share the bounty with you.

Poultry manure is high in nitrogen and other nutrients your plants need, and when you include the bedding material you have carbon and other nutrients too.

Even the eggshells break down to add calcium that all plants need to thrive, and the added bonus beyond having an amazingly healthy organic garden, you're keeping all those waste products from going elsewhere, often a landfill, and that's the last thing we need.

[gentle music] If you really wanna save money when it comes to mulch and soil products, consider buying in bulk and here's a quick and easy way to gauge if buying in bulk makes sense economically.

27 bags of average size garden soil is a cubic yard, and a cubic yard fills up a half a pickup truck load, so if you need that much or more it probably makes sense, but now let's do the economics on the math of all of that.

The cost of an average sized bag of good garden soil, let's just say it's $5 and that's about right.

Well $5 times 27 bags is $135 but that same amount of soil in bulk is only about $35, so right there is $100 savings, but if you don't need a half a pickup truck load of mulch or soil or you just like the convenience of bags, no worries.

I get it, I'm right there with you and I buy the bags quite a bit myself, but you don't need to spend full price.

Look for the broken bags and a lot of times the box stores have those bags set aside in a separate area just for that very purpose and they usually mark them down at least half price, so look for those but if you don't see them it doesn't hurt to ask the store employees or if you seem them on the racks and they're broken, go ahead and ask because usually they're happy to unload them at a minimum of half price so that's a win-win and you have nothing to lose and some great soil to gain.

[gentle music] And remember all the hidden costs that come with bagged products.

The plastic, the labor, the shipping, the fuel consumption, it all adds up.

So the next time you reach for a bagged product at the nursery, consider what it's costing you but also what it's costing the environment.

Often, there's a way to get the same material in a way that's far greener and much cheaper, sometimes for free.

Now, buying in bulk will definitely save you money on your soil and mulch products, especially over bagged products, but how does free sound?

Well three of my favorite mulch sources are absolutely free, and the first one, arborist wood chips.

Now, I always have a working pile or two around my property and I love these.

Now these are those chips that the tree services provide once they take a tree down and I had a few trees removed on my property recently and so whether you have trees taken down or you have a neighborhood service where somebody's getting some trees taken down, you can just go up to those guys and ask them if they will give you those chips and usually they'll say yes because you're saving them the time and the effort of having to deal with them elsewhere and if you have a safe place for them to dump their load that's really all they care about, so that's a good way to do it.

But even if you don't find that service in your neighborhood there's a website called chipdrop.com that you can register your information and tree companies will actually go to that and look for people in the area of where they'll be working and if your name is on that list they're gonna let you know and you may end up with a free pile of wood chips just like this.

Okay, my other favorite source of mulch, leaves.

Mother natures gift, I've already mentioned that before, but really I just can't say enough great things about using shredded leaves and so I'm going around the neighborhood collecting bags of leaves in the fall and I'm loading up my truck and I'm bringing them back here and I'm shredding them up with my mower and I'm dumping them into this pile right here, and over the winter time they're breaking down even more and then it's time for the harvest which for me is early to mid spring when I'm getting ready to prep my summer garden and I'm putting my plants in those beds and then I come with this amazing, what's called leaf mold, or shredded leaf mulch and the texture, the consistency, the way it is easy to spread and the way it breaks down into your soil and all the worms it attracts, I could go on and on but the fact that this is absolutely free and you get a little exercise along the way and then it's one of the best mulches you can possibly use in your garden and it doesn't cost you a penny, well that's not a bad thing either.

The easiest way to make leaf mulch is to run over your leaves in the fall with a mulching mower, with a bagging attachment.

You can also use a regular push mower and rake up the leaves afterward, or even run them through a chipper shredder.

Some leaf blowers also have a reverse function that sucks leaves into the machine, runs them through the impeller, and shoots the finally ground up debris into a bag.

But the point is, you could even use them whole and let them break down over time, it will take longer, you probably won't get to them the next season where they're broken down like this, but if you have a little time on your hands you don't have to do anything but put them in a corral like I do and you can even put the bags in themselves that you used to store the leaves 'cause they break down just as well and that's a carbon source too so there's no need to get rid of the bags either.

So you have lots of options, but definitely try out the shredded leaf mulch because you will love it.

Being smart about the yard work you're already doing can really pay off in the way of free gardening materials and shredded leaf mulch in the fall isn't the only example.

In fact, I end up creating a valuable garden commodity every time I mow my lawn with almost no extra effort.

One type of mulch I'm fond of using periodically are grass clippings, specifically when I've just sown some seeds and I wanna give them such protection, a mulch layer of protection, but protection that's nice and light, and so grass clippings work great for that.

Now usually I grass cycle when I mow my lawn so the grass clippings are returning organic matter right back where I cut them, plus it adds a lot of nitrogen so I'm not having to fertilize as much so that's all good, but sometimes I collect those clippings and use them as a mulch.

But here's the thing about that.

When you collect them a lot of times the grass is kind of wet or you get condensation inside the hopper and that's the case right now.

So I have a lot of clippings but they're wet and they're a little clumpy to work with if you try to spread them out right now so I prefer to wait until they get dried out more straw-like to spread them out and that's great, but that can take a little bit of time so I've got a trick to speed up the process and I wanna show you how that works so you can go from maybe a couple of days to a couple of hours before you can spread the mulch.

So the key to using the grass clippings quickly is to dry them out, or smoke them, smoking grass and it's okay in this case and it's really just heating them up, so I pour them out on some clear plastic, I think this is four mil thick, I don't know if that really matters that much, but I just do an even distribution.

One consistent thin layer is the goal so the clippings cook evenly, then you just wrap it all up in the plastic.

[gentle music] And that heat is gonna cause some of that moisture to evaporate and then it'll make it really dry and kind of straw-like and that's what makes it nice and easy to spread.

You can already see the condensation building up inside.

And yes that will trap a little bit of moisture but it'll really draw a lot of that moisture out of the grass blades and that's what I'm looking for.

And maybe a good seal, pretty good seal right there.

And then just let it cook in the sun for a few hours, no need to turn it or stir it or check on it, the heat does the work while you do other things and once it's dried out and dull in color it's much easier to scoop back up and spread in the garden wherever you need a very light top dress layer over the soil.

That leftovers mentality, putting to good use what others might just as easily throw away, that can really add up to big savings in the garden.

You're filling a need with something you already have instead of buying it new.

You know I love taking advantage of all of this growing space to grow a lot of different types of foods, certainly vegetables that's sort of the specialty inside the garden gate, but outside I take advantage of things like blueberries and raspberries and blackberries and these are easy to grow and it's the perfect place for it running these primer canes and flora canes right along these rails but the thing that's always sort of bothered me about this, is that the way that I've secured them to the rails I'm not so crazy about it, I just end up using plastic nylon string, orange cord and tying it in place.

I don't like the look of that and it's a little bit cumbersome so I started thinking there's gotta be a better way.

Turns out, that better way has been sitting right behind my barn all along.

You know those livestock panels I'm so fond of?

The heavy steel grids I use to make my very own super strong tomato cages?

Each time I make a cage I have a short section left over and I never throw those scraps away.

Well, it just so happens that remanent is the perfect length to fit between two of my fence post so I use a pair of bolt cutters to trim off the spikey ends of the panel remnant, leaving me with a simple narrow grid.

Then, I fasten one long side of the panel to the fence rail using some spare nail in clips made for coaxial cable or you can hammer in u shaped fencing staples.

Now the grid is securely held in place and I can weave the canes through the openings to keep them trained against the fence while still allowing some natural movement.

Best part, no tying and untying individual canes to the fence.

Now the key really though is to install these pieces before the plant gets too big, then as it grows up you can easily take those immature pieces and weave them in and out while they're still very pliable.

A year later the blackberries are doing great.

My homemade trellises have kept the canes contained in the fence but still give them plenty of room to grow.

They look great and they keep the berries within easy snacking reach while I'm out working in the garden.

Honestly a tip like my blackberry trellises can be one of the most fun and rewarding money savers when you think outside the box and your idea pays off.

Sometimes the repurposing of scrap material into something useful just takes a little imagination and tool skill.

Our resident DIY guy Todd Brock has another great way to get plenty of bang out of no bucks at all using something you probably already have.

- So if you do enough projects in the garden or the landscape, sooner of later you're gonna wind up with a pile of these.

Now dealing with what you ordered is one thing, nine times out of 10 you also get to deal with the thing it was shipped on.

So for most of us these pallets end up sitting on the side of the house or behind a garden shed taking up space waiting for us to do something with them.

Sending it to the landfill seems like a total waste and a lot of sanitation departments won't even take this if you drag it out to the curb with your regular trash pick-up, so what do you do?

This is all really good wood most of the time so what we're gonna do today is break this down into individual boards and use this wood to make a window planter box.

Breaking down a palette into usable board can be done with hand tools if you're very patient.

Pallets are built to be strong and sturdy and trying to pry out the nails can be a challenge that's just not worth the time.

You can spend all afternoon trying to be ginger about it, you're gonna end up breaking boards, you're gonna end up wasting a lot of the building material you wanna work with.

The faster and more fun way to do it, power tools.

A reciprocating saw is a heavy duty tool made for demolition and it'll chew through the nails quickly.

Controlling the saw and exposed blade as you separate each slat from the pallet frame can be a workout, but when you're done you should have plenty of individual boards to work with.

So I've got these little pieces of scrap wood, this is just gonna be interior blocking.

It's gonna be inside the planter box.

You won't actually see these, this'll all be buried in the dirt.

What it's gonna do is it's gonna give us a little extra material to nail to.

[loud nailing] That's the front wall of the planter box.

So here again you could use anything.

If you wanna use hammer and nails to do this you could, if you wanna use screws you could.

An air nailer makes it all really quick.

You don't see a lot of the fasteners so you don't have to worry about covering up those holes or seeing a lot of exposed hardware.

The nail gun and the air compressor that powers it you can buy the whole thing for under $200, you will be surprised at how often you use that tool.

Back wall of the planter box.

[loud nailing] The same procedure creates the bottom of the planter box.

Slats of wood nailed together through interior blocking pieces.

[loud nailing] There it is.

Really basic, really simple, really rustic, but that takes a lot of the pressure off of you.

Not every corner has to be perfect, not every seam has to match up just right but that's part of the charm of pallet wood.

The best part of pallet wood is this entire project, zero dollars.

- You know a few years back I was involved in a project of trying to feed my family of four, all summer long, all the vegetables they needed and do it on less than $25, but I had to pretend that I was a brand new gardener and I didn't have any of the things for that like seeds.

So I put it out there to the online universe and I started with Twitter and I asked people if they had free seeds that they could send me.

These are people I didn't know, but next thing I know seeds are flying in from all over the country and so by the end of the season I had my entire garden planted out with everything I needed and I did it on $12.5 thanks to that online universe.

So Twitter was great for that, but I like using Craigslist so if I have a particular need and I wanna narrow it down to my community I can specify those perimeters in Craigslist and then I can usually find what I'm looking for for little cost and sometimes free, but if I really want free my favorite source for that online is Freecycle, and I love that because you're gonna connect with people that probably have what you're looking for and they don't wanna throw it away either and have it go into a landfill but they're more than happy to give it to you if you need it.

So it's a great way to repurpose and recycle so freecycle.org is great for that.

And then speaking of online communities, Nextdoor is a really good one.

That's one where you can zero in on a tight knit neighborhood or expand out a little bit but if there's things that you wanna buy or things that you wanna sell or things that you need for free, Nextdoor is great for that and that's the site that I use when I'm going out in the fall to look for all the leaves for my leaf mulch, well that's where I put my SOS and people respond and then I show up and get there leaves.

So Nextdoor is a really good community group, and then of course there's Facebook.

That is your online community, those are the people that know you so if you have a need of any kind, reaching out to Facebook chances are you're gonna find what you're looking for.

[gentle music] Saving money in and around the garden gets noticed quickly when you're saving water while getting all the water they need to thrive.

Efficient watering is accomplished when you give your plants just the water they need and only where they need.

Drip irrigation kits and systems are a small investment upfront such as a kit like this for around $40 that includes everything you need to irrigate plenty of plants, containers, or beds using drip irrigation, so water goes just where you want it with just the amount needed to keep your plants going strong even through the hottest summer.

Add a generous layer of leaf mulch or other type of mulch and you'll be saving money and water for years to come.

And one more thing.

It is hard to save money when you have a broken hose.

They're expensive, have you checked the prices out on those lately?

Especially for the quality products.

But sooner of later you'll either cut it or nick it or run over it with a lawnmower and break it in half like I did, but it happens to the best of us.

But more often than not we just go out and buy a new hose rather than trying to repair it, and that's a shame because there are so many parts that you can get today for the front end, the back end, or that part in the middle when you run over it with a lawnmower.

Now if you find out that your hose just doesn't wanna go onto that coupler because the plastic is too stiff, well I have a trick to show you.

All you need to do is boil up some water and dip that rubber part into that boiling water for a few seconds, take it out, and then try to make it go.

And then you secure it with a clamp and you're good to go.

And there you go.

Now I hope that you found some ways to save money in your garden today, but if you'd like to go back and watch this episode again or find more information on our website, well that address is the same as our show name.

It's growingagreenerworld.com.

I'm Joe Lamp'l, thanks for joining us everybody and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing A Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [ambient electronic music] ♪ [male announcer]: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on-demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to: [funky techno jingle] ♪ ♪