6 Easy Ways to Save Money When Landscaping Your Yard – and Still Get a High-End Look on a Tight Budget

The standard advice for saving money on landscaping is to buy smaller plants, shop end-of-season sales, and do the labor yourself. All of that is sound advice. But there’s a second tier of savings that most people never tap into.

Many gardeners don’t realize that you can find free or near-free material sources, discounted plant inventory that performs just as well as full-price stock, and cheap and easy-to-grow seeds that make nursery starts look like a genuinely bad deal for certain plants.

Most of this is about legwork, not cost – which is really the whole point of backyard budget landscaping done right. I’ve compiled my top tips for landscaping any part of your yard for a high-end look on even the tightest budget.

1. Check Municipal Mulch Programs

A lot of cities and counties give away free compost or double-ground mulch through recycling centers or public works facilities. They collect the material from yard waste pickup and then process it on-site.

It doesn’t cost anything and quantities are often large enough to cover a full yard’s mulching needs in one trip. The catch worth knowing about, though, is that municipal compost sometimes comes out of the pile before it’s fully finished.

Incomplete mulch material can carry viable weed seeds, so let it sit in a heap for a few extra weeks before you put it anywhere near your beds. Seeds that are going to germinate will do so in the pile rather than your garden.

To find free mulch programs near you and whether they offer pickup or delivery, give your local public works or sanitation department a quick call or check your local city or county website.

2. Search Curbs & Plant Share Sites

Spring garden cleanup produces a staggering amount of perfectly healthy plant material that often ends up composted or curbside. Neighbors may be dividing overgrown hostas, thinning out daylilies, or pulling volunteer plants to make room in garden beds. This leaves mature, root-established stock that would normally cost money, but is now free for the asking.

Nextdoor and local Facebook gardening groups are where much of this free plant material surfaces. Low-maintenance plants like hostas, ornamental grasses, black-eyed Susans, and shrubs appear in a consistent stream, if you’re watching for them.

A plant dug up from a neighbor’s garden is often larger and better rooted than a quart pot from the nursery. That translates directly to faster establishment. The end of the growing season is a time worth monitoring too, not just spring. Fall garden cleanup moves a lot of free plants from neighbors.

3. Ask Landscapers for Leftovers

Landscaping and hardscaping crews end jobs with leftover material regularly. It could be partial sod pallets, extra stone, more mulch than the job used, or landscape edging they didn’t need. You can also find cheap, almost invisible landscape edging from Lowe's, if you're not able to find enough leftovers to surround your whole garden.

Getting it back to their business or to a disposal site costs money and time and a lot of crews would rather hand it off than deal with it themselves. If there’s a crew working nearby, asking about leftovers only takes a minute. The worst answer is no. The best is a pallet of free landscaping stones or a truckload of sod for free or close to it.

Bulk mulch jobs are especially reliable for free landscaping materials. Delivery quantities are rarely exact and disposal fees give crews real incentive to leave the excess behind. Larger hardscaping jobs – driveways, paver patios, retaining walls – are also good ones to approach, since they tend to involve a lot of leftover material as well.

4. Check the Nursery Back Lot

Many plant nurseries and larger retail garden centers keep a secondary section for trees and shrubs that don’t meet standard grading criteria. These plants may have slightly asymmetrical canopies, minor trunk lean, or a lopsided branch structure. These cosmetic issues affect the price significantly, but have little practical bearing on how the tree performs once it’s in the ground.

A tree with a lopsided canopy at purchase will often correct itself over two or three growing seasons as it responds to available light and fills in naturally. A minor trunk lean can frequently be staked and corrected during establishment and a set of tree stakes like these from Amazon make short work of it.

These clearance plants may not be in the main part of the nursery – some facilities keep it entirely out back and you might have to specifically ask garden center employees about it. But savings of 30-50% off top-grade specimens of the same species and size are common.

If you're not able to find what you want in person, look online for sales as well. Fast Growing Trees has a clearance nursery section where you can get high-quality trees and shrubs for great discounts.

5. Use Seeds for Filler Plants

Zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, bachelor’s buttons, and nasturtiums. These are plants most people buy as starts even though starting flowers from seed is the better option.

A $3 to $5 packet of zinnia seeds has enough in it to plant a 20-foot (6 m) long row and produce dozens to hundreds of plants. The same coverage in nursery starts would run well over $100, with each individual plant costing the same as a packet of seeds.

These flowers germinate fast and reliably when direct-sown after last frost with no special treatment and no fuss. The only real trade-off is timing. Buying starts gets you blooms a few weeks earlier. But for anyone not working towards a specific date, that’s not really a big deal.

An assortment of seeds, like this pollinator-friendly seed mix from Amazon, covers several of these species in one purchase and costs a fraction of the equivalent starts.

Burpee has a huge array of perennial and annual flower seeds for just a few dollars per packet. You can find almost anything you want in their wide collection.

6. Buy Bare Root Plants

Late winter to early spring is when bare root plants usually show up in nurseries and from online retailers. You can find tons of trees, shrubs, and perennials sold dormant with no soil and no container – just the plant. That’s where the price difference comes from.

No pot, no potting mix, no greenhouse time can mean around half the cost of a container-grown equivalent of the same species and size. Bare root roses, bare root fruit trees, and bare root ornamental trees are quite common, but there are even a wide range of bare root perennials now, too.

Mail-order nurseries carry species in bare root form that local garden centers rarely bother stocking, which opens up your plant selection considerably. The window to plant is short.

Bare root stock has to go in the ground while plants are dormant, so you need to plan a season ahead. But establishment is comparable to container stock when the timing is right and, on a multi-tree order, the savings add up fast.

Shop a mix of edible and ornamental bare root plants from Jackson & Perkins.