Cheap Landscaping Ideas
This blog is on cheap landscaping ideas. One of the primary problems of a garden is not planting, but weeding. Weeds grow with remarkable speed and can rapidly overtake a garden. Utilizing a poison or herbicide like roundup is not recommended as you might kill your plants. I know that the manufactors claim the product stops working in the soil very quickly but I find with my lawn edges after a second dose of roundup no grass is growing there 6 months later.
In moving into a new rental property I had a large front garden with a good quickkerb concrete border to highlight the stunning weeds. So I started to weed, got sick of it and left it for a month. Big mistake, there were now more weeds than ever. I was going to have to have mulch it or spend daily in the garden. With the landlord not thinking about paying for it it was going to need to come out of my own pocket. Now I do not mine paying for gardening supplies, plants, etc when its my own place, but I’m certainly not interested in giving my landlord a free ride. So I needed a cheap mulching option, that would appear good, work, but not cost too much.
I chose three basic supplies, newspaper -the local rags free and it doesn’t take long to build up a stock pile of papers, sugar cane mulch – its comes in a large bags and is inexpensive, and finally a couple of bags of bark – not so cheap, yet as you’ll see its used to give colour not as a mulch so only a little bit is needed.
Step One:-
Prepare the garden, yes this means an enormous effort and weed the entire garden by hand. Rake over the soil so its nice and smooth after which apply the newspaper. The thicker the better. Min. 6 sheets thick. Spread it out and then with a hose wet it all down so it soaked. The now heavy paper will not blow around in the wind and will mold better to the grounds surface.
Step Two:-
Next spread out the sugar cane mulch. In the event you cannot access cheap sugar cane mulch, try straw, however ensure it has no seeds in it. Make sure all the paper is covered. It does not have to be deep, just sufficient to cover all the paper. Once again apply water to damp down the mulch. As soon as watered it takes on a lovely golden colour.
Step Three:-
Now apply the bark. Simply grab handfulls and throw it around. You don’t want to completely cover the yellow mulch, the barks primarily to give colour and to contrase with the mulch.
I’ve found this to be a very efficient mulch. A year later and few weeds can get through. Nutgrass was the only successful one and I pulled those out by hand as well as the nutgrass gave up the fight. The beautiful browns and golden colour sadly fade under the harsh sun, but by that time you should have plenty of flower to make up for it. Best of all – NO WEEDING, yes.
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