by Carl Schultz

Created on: February 27, 2008

The first thing you should know when landscaping on a budget is that time is your friend. Time is one section of what I call the Landscape Triangle. The Landscape triangle consists of three things, time, knowledge, and money. The more you have and use of one of these things, the less you need of another. For example, if you know that generally small plants establish more quickly than large plants, and you are willing to give it time to grow, then it will cost you less money for that spot in the garden. If you take a long term vision for accomplishing your landscape and gardens, then it becomes more affordable from year to year. It can allow you to ultimately have gardens that are the envy of the neighborhood.

To do this, you need to start off with a landscape design. Going back to the Landscape Triangle, this is part of the knowledge you need to move forward. If you do not have the knowledge already, then you might consider hiring a designer. The reason is that a good landscape designer provides you with information such as what plants do well in your area, what are their mature sizes, etc. If you buy plants that do not do well in your yard, they might die. Or you might plant too many plants in an area. Each of these problems will end up costing you money. It doesn't take too many extra plants to have paid for a design; whether too many from the very beginning or from replacement.

One element in your design that you should consider, if you are trying to keep costs low, is to plan an area taking the dollars per square feet to plant it into account. Most people will walk right by the $20 hosta and buy a $4 primrose because they are on a budget. This might be a big mistake. Say a primrose will ultimately fill 1 square foot in your garden. However, that expensive hosta will cover 12 square feet. That means to fill the same area, the hosta will cost about $1.67/sq.ft. where, the cheap primrose will cost $4 /sq.ft. In other words, the hosta will cost $20 for that spot. The primroses will cost $48. Another advantage to budgeting by the square foot is that if a plant that you really want in your garden is expensive per square foot, you can balance that out by using less expensive plants elsewhere. That way a 100 square foot garden can average $2.50/sq.ft. and still have a few of those $4/sq.ft. primroses in it.

Now that you have a design, you can start your budget. A budget is a plan on how one should use their assets. Landscaping on a budget is essentially planning how

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>