Afforable Landscaping Tips

Hosting a party at our home is always the push we need to finish projects around the house.  Bailey's birthday is our yearly push to get our landscaping updated.  We have tighter budgets this year so we had to get creative.  Here are our top tips we learned to landscape on a budget.

• Learn your plants - I started my unofficial research by driving around my neighborhood taking pictures of my favorite plants so I got an idea of the types of plants that do well in our climate. 
• Free plants - I was shocked to see how many posts there were on Craigslist for free plants.  Most of them were trees that you had to dig up and hall away yourself.  We did find a nice guy who lived just a couple of miles from our home giving away bromiliads from his yard.  Kurt came home with n entire SUV filled with them.  
• Propagate plants - there are a number of plants that allow you to cut a branch off and regrow from the branch.  We cleaned up the croton's in our side yard and had enough clippings to line the other side of the house.  
• Free mulch - There were a number of tree cutting companies that give away their mulch for free or will deliver a truck load for a small fee.  If we do this again we will do a couple of things differently.  1) We will see if we could get half a truckload or coordinate with a neighbor to share a truckload.  After 10 days of moving mulch we still had so much left we were begging our neighbors to take some. 2) we will put down two tarps, the mulch leaked through the tarp and stained the driveway.  3) We will wait to pressure wash until after we mulch.  
• Avoid Home Depot and Lowes - look for local nurseries. You may need to drive a little farther, but the price savings is worth it.  I recommend calling ahead to get pricing and check their inventory.  We found sod was half the price at our nursey compared to Home Depot.  
• Get everyone involved - we made this a family project.  Even Bailey got involved.  

Any affordable landscaping tips we missed?