My Garden On the Cheap...

After leaving a large garden at my old house I was dismayed and a little excited about the fact that my new house has some shrubs and nothing more in the way of plants. It had been a while since I started a garden from scratch and I know more now than I did when I first planted.

Also, moving into a new home on one income leaves one with less money than they had at their old house to buy any plant that strikes their fancy....

Enter my garden on the cheap. I decided to start small this year and get plants only from free or very cheap sources. No Genrich's for me this year Garden Club Girls....

So my total cash outlay for the garden looks something like this:
-$12.72 8 Bags of Soil
-$29.61 9 Bags of mulch
-$15 Garden Club Plant Sale
-$15 Farmers Market Dahlia Sale (these are some major Dahlias)
-$2 Farmers Market Lily
- Gifts from Deanna and Aunt Pat
-Free plants from Susan and Grandma
-$2 on the dry and damaged Petunia you see in the hypertufa pot that I nursed back to health.
-Planted Morning Glory and Sunflower seeds that I already had

Total $76.33

I wish I could say it's the most beautiful garden I've ever created. It isn't. Parts of it are beautiful but I got a little overzealous with the morning glories. Then the deer got a little overzealous eating the leaves off the bottom of the morning glories so the result was these tall skinny green Dementors that loomed over us when we sat by them. They blew over in a wind storm but I haven't the heart to rip them out because their flowers are gorgeous. Now it's like a weird plant spill onto the driveway. Their tendrils are entwined with every plant in the garden. Deer ate the lily. A skunk lopped off the only sunflower that grew and left it in a taunting manner on the driveway. The Dahlias are stunning (I knew it!)
Next year, minus the morning glories I think it's going to be a really nice garden.