These are some of my favorite ways to save $$ and still have a beautiful garden.

1. Join a garden club, and exchange plants with members. Gardenweb.com has great seed and plant exchanges, and almost every local board has an exchange for your state. I got most of my plants through trades.

2. Make new gardening friends by stopping at someone's house who you can tell loves to garden and asking for a cutting or seeds from one of their plants. They will give them to you gladly (gardeners love to share), and you will have a new buddy!

3. Buy markdown plants and baby them back to health. Once you've been gardening awhile, you know if a plant will make it back by looking at it.

4. ALWAYS carry your clippers, moist paper towels, and ziploc bags with you. You never know when you're going to be getting cuttings from somewhere.

5. Reuse potting soil by either baking at 250 for 1/2 hour (smells awful!) or my method, which is to pour a kettle of boiling water through the pot of soil. Mix it half and half with fresh potting soil, or compost.

6. Make your own potting mix. You can use 1/3 perlite, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 organic peat (cheaper than peat moss). This is a general mix. For succulents, mix 1/2 organic peat and 1/2 coarse sand (play sand works well).

7. COMPOST! COMPOST! COMPOST! Build a cheap compost bin out of used pallets (instructions online..google pallet compost bin) and put all your leaves, grass clippings, and veggie scraps into it. You can learn composting tips online. If you don't have room for that, you can make or buy a "kitchen composter" for your veggie scraps.

8. Use leaves as mulch. If you just have to have that bark look, put down a layer of leaves, then put bark on top. That way, you use 1/2 as much of the expensive bark. You can also use newspaper to lay under mulch to keep weeds down. Cheap, and biodegradeable.

9. See if your city has a free compost or mulch program. If not, utility companies and tree companies will come and dump off a load of chips for free. They're not pretty, but again, use them as underlayment, and put pretty bark on top for looks.

10. Find someone who has animals, horses, cows, goats, rabbits, and see if you can get some free manure for fertilizer. It has to compost first, but it's great for your plants.