Landscaping, frugally: developing a long-term plan

I would love, love, love to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on trees, plants, and other landscaping features.  But, well, it’s just not in the budget.

So, I’m developing a long-term landscaping strategy to get a fantastic looking yard for pennies here and there.  OK, so I don’t really have a long-term plan.  I’m just planning on adding things bit by bit until we’re “fully landscaped”.

I planted an herb garden several years ago.  The first year, the chives (above) were pretty wimpy and I gave up on them.  The next year?  I couldn’t give enough of them away.  Not only do they taste great, their purple blooms are also gorgeous.  I’ve got a huge patch of chives, and this fall, I plan to divide them up into other parts of the yard, more as landscaping plants than as part of an herb garden.

Our daylily plants were getting bigger and bigger each year, so this spring we divided them to multiply the number of plants.  Now, instead of having three, we have seven.  Based on how much these plants grow each year, my guess is that we can probably divide every year or two if we want.

This year I planted both purple coneflowers and shasta daisies from seed.  They are slow growing; however, I’m hoping that next year they’ll come up with a bang, like my chives.  I hope to divide and transfer these plants to other places in the yard in a couple of years.  (I did buy two “big” daisy plants with a BOGO coupon from the Home Depot Garden Club.)

I’ve also attempted to propogate a plant (that I really have no idea what it is other than that it looks sort of like a hydrandgea but isn’t), but have no clue if that’s working or not.  Have to cut it off from it’s mommy plant and see if it thrives or dies.

I stay away from annuals, as it just doesn’t fit the whole long-term strategy to be buying plants that I have to buy again every year.

So, that’s my very little cost landscaping strategy.  I would be really, really thrilled to learn how to propogate trees so that, you know, I have about five high-quality, 10 foot trees in about 6 months.  If you know, I’d love to take some lessons. ;)

I would love to hear what you do to save money on landscaping!  I’m running out of ideas on how to spread out what we’ve got, and am really not that patient to wait for a bunch of stuff to grow from seed.