How do I start a garden with no money?

Five pages, one starting point: the four things you were about to buy, seeds, soil, a container and water, each have a version somebody near you is finished with. The pages disagree about whether the garden will save you money, and one of them is honest that it mostly will not. They do not disagree about this.

Seeds first, and the library may have them. A garden costs nothing to start says some public libraries run a seed library, which works exactly like the book kind: take seeds, grow them, and return some of what you harvest at the end of the season. Where there is none, community seed exchanges and swap groups do the same thing. The oldest version needs nobody: a plant that finishes its season makes next year’s seed by itself, which is why saving seed takes the whole thing off a shopping list permanently. Grow the herbs, not the potatoes adds what four conversations do about the rest of the inputs: compost free from coffee shops’ grounds, a bakery’s waste, or the council’s or the city’s giveaway days, and one account gets free manure from a local stable, composted first. One account on that page notes that in the US, food-assistance benefits can be spent on edible plants and seeds.

Soil you build rather than buy. The free-start page says a bag of compost is heavy and the price is real, and you do not need it: soil can be built where you are standing out of leaf litter, grass clippings, cardboard and kitchen scraps, layered on top of the ground rather than dug in, and left for a season. It puts one honest limit on that, and it lands on the reader with the least space. In the ground, home-made soil does well. In containers, drainage and air matter more, and the people there disagreed about whether the free route works at all; nobody settled it, so treat free soil in pots as worth trying rather than solved. The herbs page adds a correction and a high-rated caution for pots: do not put dirt from the garden into pots or grow bags, because it carries disease and holds too much water. Let the mower eat the leaves is the autumn version of building soil. Across several separate conversations, a mulching blade on a dry day turns fallen leaves into a powder that vanishes into the lawn by spring, and the gardeners there pile the shredded leaves onto beds, sometimes under mesh or a tarp, to rot into next season’s soil. The exception that page carries at full strength: heavy oak canopies, late-dropping leaves under early snow, acorn years, and a wet mat that smothers rather than feeds. If you cannot see grass between the pieces after a pass, you have too much leaf for the mower alone.

A container, and the ten minutes before you fill it. The free-start page finds beds and planters at moving sales, estate sales, thrift shops, in reclaimed wood and in household things never meant to grow anything, and says a renter with a balcony is in exactly the same position as anybody else. Drill the hole before you fill the pot is about what happens next. Eight separate conversations say a container that holds water waterlogs the roots and the plant dies of rot, so make holes in the bottom of any bucket, tub or cut-down jug before soil goes in: a drill, a heated nail held in pliers, or a screwdriver twisted through. The clear tubs that berries and roast chickens come in are for starting seeds, five separate conversations say, because they are a miniature greenhouse with a lid. Keep that distinction, because one contraindication and one caution say not to grow a plant on in a clear or translucent container: light reaching the roots grows algae and rots them. Three separate conversations start seedlings in egg cartons, and a milk jug with a pierced cap is the watering can, two conversations say.

The wood question, settled by dates. Old fence boards turn up free, and the drill page says the argument about growing food in them runs four accounts to three and three to five and never settles, because a board’s treatment cannot be read from a photograph. So it checked the regulators: arsenic-treated wood stopped being sold for homeowner use in the United States in December 2003, and stopped being used for garden wood in the United Kingdom and European Union from mid-2004. The copper-based treatments sold since are low in toxicity for vegetable beds, with a heavy plastic liner between wood and soil offered as an option rather than a requirement. Old wood of unknown age is the risk, and colour is not a test: one account says an orange tint is the tell, one correction says a green tinge is as likely to be algae or moss, and two cautions say weathering can hide the signs anyway. That page’s rule is plain. If you know the wood was bought new after 2004, use it. If you do not know its age, or it is orange-tinted, or it is a railway sleeper or a utility pole, grow flowers in it, sit on it, and grow food in something else.

Water, and the law people get wrong. The free-start page says rain barrels are the free-water answer and the barrels themselves are often free, because some businesses pay to dispose of food-grade containers and would rather hand them over. What stops people is usually a belief, and the belief is wrong: the idea that collecting rainwater is illegal traces back to a real case about diverting water out of a stream, not catching what falls on your own roof. That is not the same as unregulated. What varies by state, and sometimes by municipality, is how much you may keep and whether you have to tell anybody. Colorado is the page’s example because its limit is specific and low: two barrels holding no more than a hundred and ten gallons between them, combined and not each, collected from the roof of a home, used outdoors on the property the rain fell on, and not used for drinking or anything indoors. So the honest instruction is two steps: the ban you have heard about is almost certainly not real, and the rules where you live are worth thirty seconds of checking with your state’s water agency, or, outside the United States, a water authority or council. Two lines from that page’s safety box: keep the barrel covered and screen every opening, including the overflow, because open standing water breeds mosquitoes; and roof runoff is not drinking water, and how safe it is on food is a question the agricultural extension services genuinely disagree about, some saying do not use asphalt-shingle runoff on anything edible and others having tested it and found it clean. What they all agree on is the same short list, so use that: water the soil rather than the leaves, favour fruiting plants over leafy greens you eat raw, let the first of the runoff go before you start catching any, and never drink it.

The first thing to grow. Green onions: pay once, regrow for months costs one bunch of green onions. Cut them low, stand the white root ends in a glass with an inch or two of water on a windowsill, and change the water every couple of days; roots show within about three days. Two people in separate conversations described the same ritual, one of them a skeptic who tested it before recommending it, and both converged on a single point of failure, the water going murky. That page calls it a gateway trick, since people who started there tended to keep going: lettuce hearts, celery bases, herbs in a jar.

Who this is not for. The free-start page says it plainly: if you have no outdoor space, no windowsill that gets light and nowhere to leave a container undisturbed, free inputs solve a problem you do not have, and a community garden plot or a shared allotment is the version of this for you. Two cautions travel with the free plants, from the same page: some of the hardiest and most freely given-away plants are hardy because they spread, mint and chives among them, so keep that kind in containers; and a plant dug from the edge of a car park has been standing in whatever runs off it, so treat it as a plant to look at rather than to eat.