The Frugal Gardener

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I also have a four-prong cultivator I like very much. It was great at pulling witch grass rhizomes to the surface, but there just aren't enough of those left to warrant carrying the tool to the garden, so now I just drop down and dive in with my hands.

Free Fertilizers

A lawn rake is handy for collecting grass clippings or leaves that are good mulches and fertilizers for the garden. However, you should leave your grass clippings on the lawn where they will fertilize it. It doesn't make much sense to haul that high nitrogen fertilizer away. Nitrogen is what makes the lawn green. Don't let other people in on this fact, however. They may want to keep their grass clippings, thus eliminating a source of fertilizer. Try to hook up with someone who mows lawns for a living. Ask them what they do with the grass clippings they collect. You may be able to save them some mileage by having them dump them near your garden. It's best if you can establish a relationship with the lawn people, and gently find out if they have sprayed an herbicide recently. Generally this is done only once a year. Best you don't get the clippings from the cutting or two after they sprayed the poison. Sometimes they get touchy about the subject.

Free fertilizer is all around us, literally. The air we breath is 78 percent nitrogen, which is one of the most important elements plants need. However, legumes are the only plants able to use the nitrogen in the atmosphere. The other plants need nitrogen in another form in the soil. Legumes will leave some nitrogen in the soil for other plants. When plants die (either on top of the soil or in the soil) the nitrogen they collected during their lifetime enriches the returns. Animals also return nitrogen to the soil when they die and through their excrement.

All you need to do to find free fertilizer is to become an organic scavenger. It may not always be obvious where organic material that others don't want can be found. A good scavenger will think about the source. Someone who has a horse has organic waste, for example. I approached a man who lived just a mile away from me and asked what he did with his horse manure. Since he had hay fields I thought he probably spread it, but it cost nothing to ask. It turned out he took the manure to the dump. I was much closer. He started delivering it. I sure was sorry when he got rid of the horse.

Living in a coastal community where the tourists hate the smell of seaweed, I knew that the town raked seaweed off the beaches in the summer. Where did it go? I found that it went to the landfill where they buried it at the end of the day. Would they put it off to the side where farmers and gardeners could have access to it? Sure. Not only did I have it collected for me and brought half the way closer to my house, but when I went to get a load the dump attendant with the front-end loader filled me up. In one summer I spread seaweed over three acres of land.

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