For some homeowners, keeping a yard looking beautiful is easy. Those homeowners go outside. Survey the yard and the weather. They roll up their sleeves. And then they pull out their cell phone and speed dial their lawn or landscaping service. Problem solved.
But other homeowners find yard maintenance and gardening a little tougher. If that’s you, well, you know how it is. You either don’t have the money, or you can’t justify the expense when you know you could work on your yard yourself.
Either way, if you’re trying to make your yard flourish without spending a fortune, take these tips — in no particular order of importance — from lawn and gardening experts.
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Keep your mower blades sharpened. As long as the grass is getting cut, why does it matter?
“A dull mower blade will shred, rather than cut, grass blades, resulting in a poor quality of cut,” says Mark Schmidt, a principal scientist with John Deere, a Moline, Illinois-based company that makes agricultural machinery and lawn tractors and mowers.
If you’re thinking: Who really cares if my grass has a poor quality of cut, as long as it’s well maintained? Nobody’s going to go examine my lawn to see how the blades are trimmed, Schmidt has a response to that as well.
Grass that is shredded, as opposed to having a clean cut, he says, suddenly has potential entryways for disease.
“Disease can weaken the turf plant and make it more susceptible to damage during extreme conditions caused by weather or foot traffic,” he says.
He also says that shredded grass won’t hold water as well. If you can’t sharpen your blades and don’t have a neighbor who will do it for you ( going with the theme of doing this inexpensively), Schmidt says that your local home improvement store will probably be able to sharpen your blades. John Deere dealers, he adds, offer a mobile service that will send a technician to your home to sharpen them.
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Mow high. That is, you don’t have to be one of those homeowners who keeps their lawn cut really short. Sure, those might be fighting words in some neighborhoods, but a little longer grass is better for the environment, according to Jessyca Frederick, CEO of Water Wise Now, a La Quinta, California-based company that helps homeowners use less water in the landscape.
Frederick suggests raising the mower blades so that you aren’t cutting on the shortest setting. “You’ll save water because you’re not stressing the grass every week, and you’ll reduce water loss due to evaporation,” she says.
Use cheap weed killer. Jan Garrabrandt, who owns The Artist’s Inn and Gallery, a bed and breakfast in Terre Hill, Pennsylvania, notes that she has extensive gardens and doesn’t pay for a service; one of the things she recently started doing is using an eco-friendly weed-killing concoction: 1 gallon of vinegar, 1 cup of salt, 1 tablespoon of dish soap.
“We spray it on our gravel parking lot,” she says, saying that it’s much easier than weeding, and even if it does turn out to be slightly more expensive than a regular spray bottle of weed killer, she’d rather go that route than buy a chemical-laden liquid that ultimately isn’t good for the environment.
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Plant perennials. Sure, maybe the flowers won’t bloom for months like the annuals do, but they will come back year after year. You still may buy flowers every year, because you want to, but you won’t have to.
“Also, buy perennials that are easy to split,” says Ryan Willis, a public relations executive and a gardening hobbyist in Knoxville, Tennessee. “For example, we have a number of hostas in our backyard that I’ve been able split and use in other areas of the yard, saving me the cost of buying additional plants,” he says.
Garrabrandt is also a fan of perennials, although she does plant annuals. She suggests trading perennials with neighbors.
“It’s easy to split them and trade for another kind of plant. Local gardening clubs often have plant swaps, too,” she says.
Get cheap fertilizer. Some coffeehouses will give you their free used coffee grounds, which you can use on your lawn or flowerbeds, says James Gardner, a Brookline, Massachusetts-based consultant for a digital marketing agency. At his local coffeehouses, he picks up free grounds and takes them home. It’s a first-come, first-served type of deal, as you might imagine.
“They have a large pail near the door,” Gardner says. “They fill it periodically with used grounds packed into the same 5- to 10-pound coffee bags that the beans originally arrived in. I can easily fit one or two of them in my gym bag. They’re sealed and don’t cause any mess. I dump them into my compost or around my plants.”
Of course, using coffee grounds for a compost pile or flowerbeds is one thing; it probably isn’t very practical to go around to a bunch of coffeehouses and collect enough to actually fertilize your entire lawn. If you do fertilize your lawn, Frederick says that you don’t need to buy a big brand-name fertilizer designed to do everything.
“Buy the generic version,” she advises. And Schmidt says that the best time to fertilize is generally during the fall and early spring.
Willis, for what it’s worth, fertilizes his lawn three times a year, which he says saves on buying weed-control products throughout the year and having to replant large areas of his yard.
He also has learned to water less, even if that does occasionally mean the grass turns brown. He knows it’ll eventually become green again. He admits: “I had to teach myself patience.”
“It’s funny,” Willis says. “I used to make fun of my dad for working in the yard so much, years ago, and here I am, doing the exact same thing.”
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How to Save Money While Maintaining a Great Yard or Garden originally appeared on usnews.com
