How to Cut Your Landscape Budget in Half
Landscaping can cost as much as 15 percent of your home's value every year, which can easily add up to thousands of dollars. Many homeowners maintain expensive monoculture lawns and pay professionals full salaries to mow and care for them. Not everyone can afford that luxury -- can I get a witness? If you're aiming to cut down on your lawn-care expenditures, start using free materials and native plants, and keep your lawn small. Combined, these tactics will help cut your lawn budget in half, or even more if you've been extravagant. Taking advantage of your city's free compost, if it has any, and the tools of your neighbors can also go a long way in decreasing your budget, too. Does this Spark an idea?
Things You'll Need
- Lawn mower
- Small, drought-tolerant plants
- Compost
- Mulch
- Stones, bricks or rocks
- Grass seed
Instructions
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Keep the plants and trees that are already in your yard, and learn to care for them. Improperly watering, pruning or fertilizing a tree or plant can kill it, and then you'll have to pay to replace it with something else. Native plants thrive in your climate and soil, so instead of cutting down a tree that lacks aesthetic value on its own to replace it with an ornamental, consider ways to make your native species more attractive.
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Do your work yourself. Mow your own lawn, plant your own trees. Hiring landscapers or professional gardeners increases your landscaping budget. Skip the expensive fertilizer and leave the grass clippings on the lawn. As they break down, they will fertilize the soil. Don't worry about trying to have the greenest grass on the block, and don't mow it short. Healthy grass is 3 inches to 4½ inches high.
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Plant small, drought tolerant plants. Smaller plants cost less when you first purchase them, and drought tolerant plants will require less watering.
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Check with your local city government about free compost or mulch. Some cities have municipal composting sites that will give the material away for free. You can also make your own compost pile for free with fallen leaves, grass clippings and kitchen scraps, and make your own mulch from shredded leaves or twigs.
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Divide your existing perennial plants and replant them. To divide a plant, dig it out of the soil and pull the root system in half, then replant the two smaller pieces. You can divide mature perennials annually.
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Keep the lawn area limited in size. Lawns are expensive to install and maintain. Gather old rocks from parks, and bricks or stones from building sites, and use them to create rock gardens instead of lawns. If you do plant lawns, use seed instead of sod.
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Set up a tool swap with your neighbors for expensive items such as garden tillers or lawn mowers, or even for small tools like spades and rakes.
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References
- Photo Credit Polka Dot RF/Polka Dot/Getty Images
