Can You Start a Garden For Free? Let's Find Out...

Can you start a garden for absolutely nothing? Visit a garden center and you might think you’d have to spend a small fortune just to get the basic essentials, but I’m going to try to source everything needed without spending a penny: just my own resourcefulness, and maybe a little shameless begging, blagging and bartering!

Impossible? Let’s find out…

Improve Your Soil For Free

Every thriving vegetable garden starts with good soil, and to build and nourish soil to grow vegetables we’ll need some sort of organic matter, for example compost or well-rotted manure.

Many councils or municipalities offer free compost. Usually made from local green waste, you’ll often be able to take as much as you can carry, though always ask first, of course!

Alas, where I live there’s no such free resource, but I do know someone who keeps horses and has offered me some of that lovely, nutrient-rich muck if I come and collect it myself. I realized I haven’t yet got any tools to gather this bounty, but fortunately they had a shovel I could borrow! Stables and family farms often give away manure for free so long as you’re happy to collect it. They’ll usually be delighted someone is taking it off their hands!

The manure I collected was stacked and had clearly been rotting away for several months, which means it’s good to use straight away. But if it was super fresh manure, I’d pile it up and leave it to rot down for a few months before using it, as it will be just a bit too strong to use straight away. It’s important to ask what the animals it came from have been grazing on, and make sure no persistent herbicides have been used in their pasture. That stuff hangs around in manure, and it could kill the plants you’re about to grow.

So far this has cost me nothing, so we’re off to a strong start! At the end, I’ll share a table showing the costs of buying everything compared what I actually spent.

Easy Vegetable Beds

If you’re planting onto a weedy area or lawn, the easiest way to create a new bed is to suppress the weeds and then lay your manure or other soil amendments on top. There’s no hard graft or weed membrane needed – just a few layers of plain brown cardboard rescued from the recycling pile.

Spread your compost or manure on top of the cardboard to a few inches deep. Doing this in winter or fall is ideal, because it will give it a good few months to settle down before it’s time to plant in spring.

Well-manured ground won’t really need much more in the way of nutrition, but some plants enjoy an extra boost so I will be making my own liquid fertilizers once the growing season’s underway. These cost me nothing, are jolly good fun to make, and really help add a little extra goodness for hungry crops like squashes. You can make free liquid fertilizer from plants in your own garden, including weeds like nettles.

Something that will help our crops come summer is mulch, which is basically anything popped over the soil surface to keep weeds down and at the same time retain valuable soil moisture. And there’s nothing cheaper and more readily available than good old grass clippings and fallen autumn leaves. They will help to shade the soil to protect it from the heat of the sun, and lock in valuable moisture. All free and 100% natural!

Source Seeds and Plants

You can’t have a garden without seeds and plants, but they can take up quite a chunk of the gardening budget. The good news is, they needn’t!

Check out local seed swaps. Gardeners always end up with more seeds than they can sow – some seed packets contain hundreds if not thousands of seeds! – so this is a great way to get new seeds and, in the future, offload any excess you might have. Some public libraries even offer a free seed library service. Or ask gardening friends if they could spare literally a few pinches of seeds. I suspect you’ll find they’ll be thrilled to help! Or put a call out on your local community page on Facebook and see what horticultural gems turn up. Don’t be shy to ask – you could always offer them something in return, such as preserves made from what you manage to grow.

Look for bargains too: I found a ‘vegetable garden starter pack’ of seeds for £4.50 ($6) which includes five individual packets of beginner favorites including carrots, lettuce, beets, salad onions, and radish for less than a fiver. This one pack alone will get things off to a flying start.

Another in-the-know trick is to grow veggies from kitchen scraps. Not all supermarket produce is viable, but garlic cloves and seeds from things like dried beans and tomatoes often sprout beautifully. It’s also very easy to grow herbs from cuttings taken from supermarket packs of herbs.

I bought a bag of mixed chilies which had been cut in price to just 25p (about 30 cents). I cut open the ripe red chilies and scooped out the seeds inside. The best bit is nothing’s wasted here – I’ll still eat the chilies! – so in effect these seeds cost me nothing.

Recycled Pots, Trays and Sundries

To sow our seeds, we’ll need some sort of pots or trays. But instead of buying them, I had a root around in the recycling bin. I found plenty of containers to recycle into pots such as yogurt pots, fruit punnets and trays, and these can all be given a new lease of life by spiking holes into the bottom for drainage for use as seedling pots.

Another great source of second-hand plant pots is garden centers, nurseries, or even online classifieds from the likes of Gumtree, Freecycle or Craigslist. You can often pick up used pots for pennies or even nothing at all.

To fill them I needed some sort of potting mix, so I turned to my long-suffering neighbor, Trevor, and he was kind enough to share some of his leftover potting mix. To make it go further, I added some of my own fine, well-sieved leaf mold. This is made from raked up leaves which have been piled up and left to break down. It does take a year or two, but the result is fairly sterile and beautifully crumbly stuff. It’s ideal for mixing in to potting mixes to make them go further.

Okay, so now to sow some of those seeds. Some plants, like my chilies, like it toasty warm to germinate, and a heat mat or heated propagator is a handy thing to get them going. However, to keep costs down just pop them onto a warm windowsill or some other warm spot in the house such as on top of the fridge. A humidity dome is a useful addition to keep seeds snug and prevent them from drying out, but you can make your own for free by simply popping a piece of clear plastic saved from the recycling over the top, secured with a rubber band.

Once the growing season gets underway, you’ll need supports for tall or climbing crops like beans and tomatoes. Luckily, I have my own clump of bamboo in the garden – perfect for cutting for my own free bamboo canes. Some bamboos can be invasive, but clump-forming varieties are much more manageable. Homegrown bamboo is absolute garden gold – a free, constantly regenerating source of plant supports to tap into, whenever you need them. Another option is to regularly cut back hazel or other shrubs that produce long, straight stems.

And for soft, plant-friendly ties, you can cut old cotton garments into strips and use them to tie plants to their supports. They’ll be gentle on stems and last surprisingly well, and it’s a great way to repurpose old holey socks and worn-out or less-than-trendy t-shirts into something truly invaluable in the garden. Nothing goes to waste, and it’s all free!

With soil prepped, seedlings underway, and plant supports and mulches sorted, there’s not much else needed to get us over the finishing line to harvest time – but some tools might help!

Beg or Blag Some Garden Tools!

We don’t need many tools to get started, but at the very least we’ll need to get hold of a fork for digging and spreading the likes of compost and manure, and perhaps a hand fork or trowel for digging smaller planting holes and weeding. That’s my bare minimum, so let’s see what we can do.

I put a call out on Facebook to see if any of my friends have any old tools lurking at the back of their shed that I might be able have, and someone messaged me back to say they have a sturdy fork, a hand fork, and a rake. It feels a bit cheeky nabbing something for nothing like this, but I’ll be sure to share some of my harvests later on in the summer.

Free Watering

A watering can is another essential, and for seedlings there is a way to get one for free. Spike holes across the lid of a plastic drinks bottle, fill it with water, then turn it upside-down to make a watering can that delivers a gentle flow of water to delicate seedlings.

Plants generally prefer rainwater to mains water, and metered water can prove expensive, so it’s definitely worth collecting every last drop of rain that you can from house and shed roofs. If you don’t have the means to collect a water barrel, it may be worth checking with your local water authority because some promote water conservation by giving them away for free. After a look on Facebook Marketplace, I found someone in the next village who had a water barrel for sale for just a fiver! It’s not free, granted, but it’s still an absolute bargain.

I’d say that’s us done! The foundations of a new garden are underway, with everything we’ll need to grow and tend it safely acquired. So let’s just sum up what we’ve spent to get us to this very promising point:

OK, I haven’t quite managed to start a garden for free but, hey, I’ve got everything needed for a new vegetable garden – tools, soil amendments, seeds and sundries – all for the same price as a couple of beers. I’m pretty pleased with that!

I love free stuff, don’t you? Something else you can grab for free is the 7 day trial of our Garden Planner, which will help you plan your garden so every square inch of space can bag you maximum harvests! Try it for yourself – no card details needed.