Thrifty and Pretty Garden!

This is truly such a wonderful time of the year if you love to garden. I usually start thinking in March what kind of plants I want to add to my garden. It can become quite costly though especially when you think  flowers should be hanging and growing in every corner of your garden. I do several things to keep my cost down. I look for unusual containers at the thrift stores to plant my flowers in. Sometimes you have to look at the item and forget what it was meant for. Think of how can you use it.

I love this 3 tier basket and most people never guess it was intended for the kitchen. I cut and stitched new coco liners for them and planted Sedum and Stonecrop in them. Here is a closeup for you of one tier.

Can you believe I only paid a dollar for this cool hanging basket at a yard sale? OK... one more closeup of another tier.

Another trick that I do to get more bang for my buck is to buy one big hanging basket and subdivide them into two or three baskets. These Ferns started out as one giant basket. My plans are to subdivide them again to get another fern basket made up. Lets hope this weekend coming,  fingers crossed.

 

As you can tell I really like the wire hanging baskets with coco liners. The Dollar Tree normally has the hanging baskets and liners. You can also grab some nice heavy duty ones at the end of the season when they are on clearance. I find the ones from Dollar Tree work well on the annual baskets I make up and the heavy duty ones work better for my Ferns.

This is one of a set of planters I made up with 2 hanging baskets and some Daylillies  divided from my yard. I do intend on adding some Creeping Jenny to it this weekend. I love that stuff. One of my favorite plants!!  The very last tip for now will be to take any perennial that someone is giving away. I have a whole bag of  Irises that someone gave me in the fall.  I spread them through 4 pots, now I just need to add a trailing plant and some annuals to them. Soon they will be worthy of what you see at the nurseries. What do you do in your garden that is thrifty and frugal?

One of my favorite places

I absolutely love visiting thrift stores, garage sales or flea markets. I love the hunt for something special, the unexpected and the forgotten object waiting to be treasured again. I am so lucky that where we live now has so many thrift stores and community yard sales. I know not everyone appreciates old or used things but I have always been someone who never quites looks at things as they are but more of what they can be. Just look at what I found last week :

I think these will look so sweet hanging in my kichen. They were just 50 cents ea!

I loved these dishes! I thought these would look great for a spring table setting.

(Excuse the mess in the pic , I am on spring break and have like 5 projects going, all in seperate rooms!)

I plan on transforming this into something  really neat for the garden. I will have to show you when I am done!  I usually spend my Saturday morning hitting up my local thrift stores. I do believe my boys have inherited this gene too. They tend to be very disappointed if for some reason we do not head out for our weekly excursion. Well I need to get busy with all of these projects I am working on. My spring break is slipping away rather quickly!