Why you should stop buying landscape supplies by the bag

Need soil for your raised beds, mulch for your roses or rock for your pathways? Do yourself a favor. Stop buying large quantities of landscape supplies by the bag. It's much less expensive by the truckload. So much less, in fact, that even with delivery fees, you can save a bundle.

How many bags of soil at 4 bucks a bag does it take to fill an average sized raised bed? A lot more than 10. One bag doesn't even fill one of the buckets pictured above! And yet, you can get far superior soil from a garden center for about 40 bucks a yard. That's enough to fill a small truck bed or half a large truck bed. It will fill two raised beds with a bit leftover.

If you don't have a truck, many garden centers will deliver landscape materials to your door for 60-80 dollars. That may sound like a lot but if you need a large quantity, remember they can usually deliver up to 15 yards in one trip, thereby saving you gas, time and money.

I can't even fathom how much more 15 yards of bagged soil would cost, not to mention your aching back from loading and transporting all those individual bags. A delivery truck will dump supplies right where you need them or close enough to save you a lot of footwork. No more labor intensive loading and unloading!

Splitting the cost of landscape supplies and delivery with a neighbor or multiple neighbors will save you even more. The bigger the load, the better your transportation savings. So why not?

Hubby and I just paid 80. for 2 yards of eco-friendly compost. The same amount of compost in bags would have cost over 300. We just don't have that kind of money. Heck, we barely had the 80 bucks but we knew bags would cost even more and it's time to get this whole yard garden project started already. Luckily we do have a truck that holds 2 yards of just about any landscape material, so transportation was free, other than gas.

Next year, we'll have our own compost from a pile we just started. That's another great way to save. Homemade compost can usually be planted in, provided it's not overly nitrogen heavy. We don't use nitrogen heavy animal waste in ours so we won't need to buy garden soil or fertilizer ever again. It's an all in one solution.

If you're not a gardener, you can still save money buying bulk landscape materials. Mulch, rock and sand are all far cheaper by the yard than they are by the bag. We highly recommend mulch or breeze for pathways. It's much lighter than rock and still pleasing to the eye.

Speaking of mulch, ours was virtually free. I'll tell you about that in a later post. Until then, happy gardening! And don't let me catch you buying bagged landscape material ever again!