No Money? Here's 19 Ways You Can Create A Garden For FREE!

welcome to the altenew cottage jack are you going to say hello one of the things that sort of intrigues me you know when i look at other gardening sites on youtube whether they be allotment sites or garden sites there's an awful lot of buying of new stuff there's a lot of buying of pots and i can only refer back to the very early days of the alternate project when i had literally just enough money to cover my mortgage each month i had no money for pots or plants or anything so i had to be quite creative shall we say now one of the things that i did i went to my local garden center before i even became a customer really you know i went to my local garden center that also did landscaping and i asked them do they have any pots that they were throwing out and they showed me around the back and absolutely masses of pots masses of them and i think that they all go to a recycling center to be fair you know i'm not saying that the garden centers throw them away i think the most will go to the recycling they may have to pay to recycle them i don't know but you know case in point i went down to my local garden center again today because i had to get some compost and what i needed was some pots to put on some of my little seedling trees but i also needed some pots to cut the bottoms out off to use over in my new vegetable bed because you know for year one i'm using bottomless pots a fair bit because of the shallow depth of the compost and the fact that i have a cotton or two cotton curtains is a membrane and i don't want to cut through them i want to keep that membrane secure for a couple of years it will rot eventually of course for a couple of years just to suppress those really persistent plants that i don't want i.e meadow sweet and some raspberry canes i planted raspberry i shouldn't have anyway hey ho lord of parts i'm a very happy woman because i can now carry on with my planting out of my vegetable garden so absolutely free um it's amazing what you can forage for free you know it really is amazing and um there's another place where you can go and forage for free let me tell you about that so again when it comes to foraging never be afraid to ask i got this fish box in the market from the fishmonger um who's tidying up at the end of the day and these are boxes that he threw away quite frankly and i asked him could i have a couple and he said absolutely sure and they've been the most brilliant boxes for growing on seedlings and plants and of course my very famous cotton come again or microgreens as you like to call them except that i just use any seed that sprouts green that's edible [Music] free tires free mostly shipped off to the third world because you know us in the west we don't like to own our own waste but anyway i've taken lots of tires over the years and these two are have been used for planting my very famous rose look roses love to have warm feet so tires being black attract the heat of the sun and hold the heat of the sun the great insulators and again they're free continuing on the foraging thing there's another way to do it many people ask me what this beautiful plant is and i tell them it's euphorbia i can't say more than that because this is a plant that i got through helping someone do their garden when i first i think the first couple of years that i was here i got to know various people you know through the library and stuff like that in town and one of the one of the people that i got to know was an older lady who had a fairly big garden and she needed some help and we got chatting you know and i said oh i'd be happy to come around and give you a hand and uh yeah she made me dinner and everything it was really nice of her you know but i spent um i suppose about four or five hours around in her garden and she was you know she was an avid gardener she was dividing up plants and and um you know she's so that that can go and i was literally filling a trailer and i had a trailer at the time because one of the things that i thought was going to be very useful for me was an old banger of a car and a trailer and i got that in the very early days so i was putting all this stuff that you didn't want into the trailer because i thought okay i can start my compost heap with this you see because i said that i would take all the cuttings and all the dead stuff away well she had some beautiful logs there from the tree that was failed sometime before i got those they helped make me they helped me to make raised beds this is some of the beautiful euphorbia from her garden i remember that day i came home and i literally kind of sat it on top of the soil put some compost around it and just let it go and it's been coming up every year and it's since taken cuttings off but down near the old silk pond [Applause] fuchsia masses of fuchsia cuttings i think the very first tribes cuttings i got there there were so many plants that i got that helped me get this garden established it was amazing and it was all through just offering my my services free you know it was something which i which i've always practiced i've always practiced um you know just just being a decent person wherever possible you know and um i've always had great rewards for it so can't go wrong i'll just show you some of the logs that they're still here these are some of the huge logs now not not that one there not that little one but these ones look and you can see now they're they're almost soil in fact they're making soil now oh there you go stones and bogwood i've dug all these stones out of the soil here because roscommon is famous for stony soil as is most of the west of ireland really and on the top is a piece of bulk oak so look stones and old wood go together beautifully i couldn't resist then putting some heathers in behind it and some rhododendron which flowers in the spring on top of that so a free raised bed look how beautiful it is with some free valerian growing on the outside of the stones because they love stony soil they love limestone steps made using some stones that i dug up and some cement that i made up stand the stones in front put some stones and cement in behind and voila virtually free you've got to buy the cement that's an old tin bread bin that the bottom fell out of makes a great planter just put straight on top of the gravel and filled with lots of compost free and compost free and then some cuttings off honeysuckle and before you know it you've got this and growing all the way around the side it can't be bad can it even got some tires around the back of the shoeshed because again they make great planters for things like bay trees rosemary roses heavies virtually anything oh talking of tyres and planters i've got my clematis growing out of those two tires look at that so you don't really need to go spending money to have a beautiful garden or even if you've got purse soil there's nothing going to wash out of those tires you can't afford a bench this is what you do so i had lots of bits of old wood that i picked up from building sites and you can see how i've made the legs of this bench the top of the bench is a piece of a sleeper and the legs have been made from cutting up sewing up a stack of wood all the same size and then nailing each one on top of the other a bench has been there for years it's going nowhere so you want to make a little flower bed and you've got no materials well you could just lay down pieces of wood and disperse with pieces of stone interspersed with the old pot and uh sometimes two pieces of wood like two logs that you've cut up here all it's there for is to hold the earth in place and once the plants get embedded into that earth the earth isn't going anywhere it's going to stay put look i've even got an old an old piece of a castle window in there look at that that's from an old castle this is some of my beautiful sedums planted into an old tin i think this was um a titan lion syrupton and placed upon an old stand that again was foraged and if you put them in a fairly dry spot they just look thrive elegant that looks well frugal gardening i've got to include the window boxes because both the window boxes were made by myself out of some wood that was in the barn nothing specific just it was a one big long plank of wood and i decided to make three window boxes out of it for the three windows at the front of the cottage so in terms of cost um the wood was there i made the window boxes so i suppose the cost is zero and yes i painted them with garden paint but that was already there in the barn so very frugal more frugal gardening an arch made out of wood these are just bits of wood that i compassed oh look there's a little clematis flower beginning to come out there so just cut this wood stuck straight into the ground on either side and some of it's rooted so the ribs here rooted so i'm going to be winding that up through the whole setup just to stabilize it cost zero maybe i should call this video zero cost gardening i don't know oh it's got honeysuckle on it and clematis and now by default ribes as well look and there's some chinese forget me not right come on jack let's show let's show the folks more frugal gardening because i've got to add in the rustic arch that i made again which cost me zero so all of this wood by the top bit which i found on the beach all of this wood was um coppiced here so i grew it accomplished it and made the rustic arch well i would like to say the cost was zero but i did pay a huge amount of money for the string yes for some reason or other string has gone up in price but i suppose i could have actually used um other materials if if i hadn't had the money for the string so you could say zero yeah frugal gardening another arch cost zero uh it was two pieces of laurel that i stuck in one either side of the path and i grew the lower lawn as bushes and let them grow high enough and then i started to tie them in over the top of my head and after a few years beautiful laurel arch you know laurel is a fantastic plant to use if you want to do any kind of gardening that involves creating structures in the garden laurel is brilliant well the stone circle here at the very top of the garden on the wild edge this was constructed by myself with a little help from my brother hugh who brought in some of the bigger stones from the bank up there and this is a 13 stone circle and of course stones were here so again use natural materials which are close to hand and if you're lucky enough to have stones and these are quite ancient stones i say ancient because some of them have been worked that were there in the bank and where i've taken them out of course has made room now for these beautiful ferns so yes you could say cast zero sign to the word pigeons beautiful my little hook look at that hedges in the in your garden shouldn't cost you anything at all if you have access to cuttings so from a neighbor or a friend or if you're quite walking you can get cuttings these are cuttings of spirea and they're just put straight into the earth here and they've made this beautiful hedge and if i walk down further there's some beautiful box look which again this has cost me nothing at all so the ultimate frugal gardening just put the cutting straight into the earth and as they start to grow start clipping them and allowing them to thicken up and before you know it you have a hedge and that cost you zero often wonder why people quite buying hedging plants buying one or two is okay because then you can take cuttings from them but to buy masses to put a hedge in seems to be ridiculous you can see from this little one that i just started last year how it begins to grow you can see just the single cuttings i've put in all the way along here and i'm going to be giving those their first cut in the next week or two and then that starts to thicken them up also just take you through here there is the famous willow arches now in the early days i've made i made loads of willow arches here in the garden and i also made willow fencing so it's a living fence it's called a veg and you can see very simple to do if you want to know how to do it go onto the website or just type in willow arch be out in the cottage and there will be lots and lots of informative material will come up on your search engine free frugal free also this little kind of wattle fencing which is made with willow and dogwood with um a beach along the bottom because you don't want the willow too close to the soil because it'll root and it did cost a little bit because i used fencing posts cut down into three so each fencing post which was two euro to buy um cut down into three bits so i've got one two three four i think there's about five fencing posts in there so yeah i suppose the total would have been about 10 euro now this is a lovely old copper bowl and it's sat back on um a chair uh an iron chair a garden chair the chair was going to be thrown out because it's only got three legs one of the legs is broken away so it's sort of balanced there and of course with the little bird bath sitting on the top or the little bird drinker sitting on the top no one's going to try and sit down in it i hope not in a way so again it's about repurposing things and making the most of what you have and being creative with all the bits and bobs that you already have in and around your home or which you can find sometimes just people throw out as junk or as i said earlier you know recycling centers go there and watch what people are taking out of their cars and if you see something that's going to be useful or interesting step forward and say i'd really like to have that would you mind if you give that to me and most people say yes sure i mean what would you say last but not least because i need to wrap up this video but there's lots and lots more to show you of course which i will do in other videos last but not least the ferns remember i had a pot of ferns it started off as one small fern in a pot which i collected from a woodland i grew it on in the pot and then it looked very nice where it was so i left it for several years and the pot became totally overgrown with ferns and i had to literally um take an axe to take the ferns apart but from that one part i got 11 pots of ferns look so they're all here and some of the some of the pots have got more than one they've got several coming up in them and these are the rest of them here so i've got 11 beautiful ferns now to plant out in my garden so how simple is that [Applause] so tuesday evening i'm going to say blessings to you all and i'm going to go indoors and upload this video before i settle down for the evening i think it must be getting on for about eight o'clock maybe it's later so it's quite close to my bedtime i like to go to bed when the sun goes down especially at this time of the year because it's absolutely beautiful to get up early in the morning get up about six or seven and just welcome that day in blessings you can support me out in the cottage and the work i do across social media by buying any one of my books that's the first one a cottage in three acres that tells the story of how beautiful cottage came into being there are books maps um a calendar printed each year and bumper stickers and the link to purchasing any of these can be found below every video all are printed here in ireland in my local town and all are posted from ireland in my local post office you

Channel: Bealtaine Cottage

Views: 40,695

Rating: 4.9573145 out of 5

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Id: UWkU7ZK-O54

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021