Using what you have is the key to beating rising gardening costs
The cost of living crisis and Brexit have caused the price of everything to go up, says our expert Agnes Stevenson, but there is a way to garden cheaply.
The hellebores I planted a few years ago are clumping up nicely and I’d like to grow more. However after contacting the nursery that supplied the originals and discovering the same hellebores were now three times the price, I had to come up with an alternative plan and not just for this part of this border, but for the entire garden.
In the same way that the weekly shop has soared in price, everything for the garden is now more expensive. On a recent trip I found lupins were now £12, a pot of flowering currant was £25 and I was offered two bags of compost for the same price that last year I was paying for three.
There are reasons for all this. Many plants are raised in heated greenhouses and the cost of keeping these warm has soared. Transport costs have risen and, following Brexit, it is more expensive to import plants from the continent.
So what can we do to cut the cost of having a beautiful garden? It’s a question I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately and I’ve been helped by a bit of advice that has made me look at this in a different way.
I can’t remember where I read it, but the words “start from where you are and use what you have” struck a chord and have changed my attitude to how I work in my garden. I’m now focused on raising as much as I can from seed and when I do buy plants I purchase just a few then propagate them vigorously.
Two small pots of Verbena bonariensis, picked up cheaply at a supermarket, have yielded up 10 new plants while instead of buying dahlias I’ve raised dozens from a packet of seed that cost the same as one tuber.
I’ve been swapping plants with friends and family, digging up emerging perennials and
dividing them to make new plants and when I found a fantastic variety of flowering currant growing on a piece of waste ground, I cut a few stems which are now in a vase on the kitchen table waiting for roots to emerge before I pot them up.
I grow lots of plants in containers but instead of using fresh compost when I renew the displays, I tip out what’s already in there, search through it for signs of vine weevil larvae, then mix in a little bit of fresh compost and a handful of general purpose fertiliser then put it all back in the pot.
I’ve also taken cuttings from my existing lupins and after an hour spent grubbing about under my hellebores, I have a dozen little seedlings that I’m growing on in the greenhouse and which will go back out into the garden once they have turned into sturdy plants.
This may not be instant gardening, but it costs little more than time and patience and it is also far more rewarding than simply going shopping when you need a new plant.