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What is Your Garden Costing You?
by Ron Williams
Description: Tips for figuring out what your garden is costing you.
It can be a scary exercise to sit down and work out exactly what is
spent every year, on the average home gardens and lawns. Try adding
up the costs of plants, weedicides, pesticides, fungicides,
fertilisers, petrol, mower and trimmer maintenance, weed eater cord,
garden mulch and even water costs. Even the time and effort we go to
in order to maintain a good-looking environment for our families and
ourselves can amount to a substantial price.
So it is no wonder that many people are looking at ways to save money
for more important causes.
One of the first things that you can do to save money, is to make use
of as much of that organic matter that many people throw in the bin
or wash down the sink.
For instance do you throw out your lawn clippings?
Do you dutifully wrap up and throw out those old veggie scraps?
Are you one of those people who regularly get the trailer out and
make trips down to the landfill with a pile of branch prunings?
What about those pile of leaves you threw in the bin last autumn?
Do you realise that all of those things can be turned into a
wonderful form of plant food, as well as being used as a barrier to
prevent the soil from loosing moisture and therefore increasing the
amount of time between watering your garden. An organic mulch will
also improve the soil structure, increase the good animals like worms
while assisting in decreasing the nasty pests living in the soil.
By keeping these sorts of things within your own garden you are also
assisting in reducing the effects that city living is having on the
environment in landfill problems and costs.
There are a number of different ways that you can recycle these piles
of organic matter within your own yard. One is to apply the bulk
organic matter directly to your garden beds, ensuring that you don't
pile the material directly up against the trunks or main stems of the
plants. A second idea to get a worm farm and recycle your kitchen
waste that way; the worms provide you with a very strong and
nutritious fertilising liquid for the garden as a bonus. This liquid
is so strong it has to be diluted 10-1. Don't, by the way, put meat
products, citrus peels or onion and garlic in with the worms. A third
way is to purchase or construct your own compost pile/bin/tumbler and
recycle the material that way.
So just by composting your old leaves, soft cuttings, veggie and
fruit scraps, chipped branches, lawn clippings etc., you can do a lot
to reduce your costs that you would have spent on such things as
garden mulch and fertilisers as well as assisting your plants to last
much longer between watering periods. So as you can see there are a
number of reasons for not throwing away all that organic material.
Ron Williams is a freelance writer as well as being a Horticulturist
and a Rehabilitation Therapy Aid at a Psychiatric Hospital in
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. He writes ezines for wz.com. He also
owns a diuscussion group about Australian Gardening, called
austgardens at groups.yahoo.com.
