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help!
We are renting& have a l1st floor garden flat. We had a small lawn & floeer bed which we could manage time & budget wise but now our landlord has taken out a couple of bay trees & loads of brambles making our "gardy" as my daughter calls it - 3x bigger. Which is great except we don t have the budget or the contacts in Cardiff (where we ve recently moved) to fill it. Obviously we don t want it to turn into a wasteland..any tips or ways of getting plants/seeds very cheap? thanks. ( we re beginners btw).
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The cheapest way would be scoop up the discounted plants at your local garden centre, preferably get perennials. Check for gardening clubs that have annual fund-raiser sales, they're usually fairly cheap.
Perhaps also think about whether a fruit tree or two might work for you, fairly cheap and very healthy! You can control their size with relatively little effort so you don't end up in the situation you were.
Failing that, your daughter might just enjoy the extra space, so buy some grass seed and get sowing!
Good luck.
Sometimes the DIY stores have an area of discounted plants. These tend to be things that have suffered a degree of neglect but you can often pick up one or two reasonable things for next to nothing. With a good soak and a bit of TLC you can get some good things this way. Just avoid the things that have gone brown.
Don't be afraid to buy plants at the side of the road. Some people sell off their surplus plants for next to nothing and they always label the plants so you can Google them and check what you are getting.
Go for ground cover plants like hardy geraniums. Some, like macrorrhizum, are evergreen and spread nicely so you can start with three plants and they will gradually expand. You can easily take cuttings of these too. They need very little care and flower like mad in the summer.
You could cover the newly vacated area with bark chipping and use pots of plants to give colour each season. You will be able to take those with you when you move so you won't be spending money for someone else's benefit. Small evergreen shrubs make a good background to spring flowering bulbs and cascading summer flowers.
Good luck with your garden. It is always difficult to know what to do when you are starting out and my own first, and very tiny, garden was a neglected patch that would now break my heart. If you are renting you won't want to spend too much time or money on the plot but many perennials are easy to take with you when you move, if only as cuttings.
Poundland or other pound shops always have plants and boxes/packets of seeds. Some of the plants, particularly the bushes and shrubs can be in poor condition because of neglect and lack of light but if they have some decent growth on them and aren't totally wilted or dead they are worth buying. The roses in particular seem to survive the shop environment for some time.
Even if what growth there is on the plants is white because of lack of light, they will recover when planted out. The best buys in these shops are the packs of lilies, dahlias and other bulb plants. The seed boxes are usually a combination of annuals, biennials and perennials and are very good value as they usually cover between 20 - 60 square metres.
Other high street shops for those on a budget are Wilkinsons for seeds and B&M for seed boxes and cheap plants. Look out for really cheap prices in Wilkinsons towards the end of summer, beginning of autumn when all their gardening stuff gets reduced and packets of seeds in particular are extremely cheap. They also start reducing stuff like bulbs when it's approaching the end of their planting season e.g. tulips come into store in early autumn and by around October they start reducing them. But their prices for bulbs are reasonable anyway.
My last suggestion is eBay, particularly for seeds.