Garden Accessories On the Cheap

Gardening can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be. Many bags of leaves fall on us every year from the mature oaks on the western side of our neighbor's yard. This year it hit me: Hey! Free mulch! Pennies from Heaven!

Other stuff becomes available due to the continuous renovation projects in a neighborhood of older houses with gainfully-employed owners: old windows (unbroken, but unfashionable) for cold frames, scrap wood, grass clippings, etc.
I actually scavenged some stakes this past summer from someone's renovation project garbage- evidently they ordered extra narrow wooden baseboards, and they left them by the side of the road for trash pickup with the older ripped-out wood. I picked up all I could carry, because they were too long to fit in the car. They're in the garage now, waiting to be trimmed down for springtime use. If you live in an urban or suburban area, do not be ashamed to scavenge the stuff stacked by the side of the road. I get my papers for mulching from there, as well as stakes and pots (wash the pots well with bleach-water and expose to sunlight for a day or two before using to kill any disease organisms). I even found one of the Foxfire books (Appalachian Cookery) in a box by the road! I don't go digging through the trash cans, but I do casually survey the roadside the evening before pickup. Someone else's trash could be your treasure.