I’m a lazy gardener, and here are some of my favourite tips 🙂
If you don’t want to plant a whole garden or don’t have the room for it, check out these pre-planted baskets at Jardins St. Leon. The salad bowl has 4 or 5 types of lettuce in it, and it’s $9!! What a great deal! A summer’s worth of salads in there, this would make a great teacher gift, hostess gift, bday gift etc.
I also got their herb basket, think this one was $20, dill, parsley, basil, rosemary. I love how easy these are, plus they are ready to eat. The containers are nice and sturdy, it’s not a cheap container. We bought these last weekend, and have had salad 3 times, and used lots of the herbs already. Well worth it – and after this week’s hail storm it was nice to just run outside and bring these indoors. My planted stuff didn’t fare so well. Plus these require no weeding and can be kept indoors, or right by the door for fast picking. Great idea for people in apartments and condo’s – think these are becoming more popular with baby boomers downsizing. They had an amazing selection!
Another cheap way to garden is to look online for free plants, seeds etc.  A lot of people have extra and will list them on freecycle or kijiji. And if you’re buying plants or seeds you can split them with a friend to cut costs.
If you don’t have any room to garden, check out FruitShare Manitoba – you get to pick and keep a percentage, check out all the details on their site.
A lot of areas have community gardens too, just google it with your area to find one. Or, ask a neighbour to split the work, especially if they’re not planning on planting their garden this year. You can also use your old blue boxes as planters if space is limited, they’re deep enough to even grow potatoes.
My cheapest planting tip is to plant zucchini – it grows super fast, requires almost no work and the bounty is plentiful! If space is an issue just cut all the big leaves off, i’ve done this for years and it doesn’t seem to affect the plant at all. You can use zucchini in baking, on it’s own – lots of possibilities, it’s the most versatile veggie I think.
What are your cheap gardening tips? What’s your favourite thing to plant for best bang for your buck?
Tomatoes are a cheap harvest. With a couple of plants, you will have a bounty of tomatoes to use and they taste so much better. they don’t require much but water and space. They are also very easy to grow from seed if you know someone with a grow light. My neighbor does this and gives out tomato plants to everyone on the block! Cherry tomatoes are fun too, a nice sweet treat for kids! i will try your zucchini trick as usually i end up with overgrown plants all over the place in the yard!
I love doing tomatoes too – my family doesn’t like them too much though so I’ve really had to cut back on how many i plant. For some reason they’ll both eat as much zucchini as i grow though 🙂 And so fun to hand out tomato plants, great neighbour there!