7 Ingredients of a MoneySaving Garden

"People get excited about going out and planting a garden," Smith says. "And what they do is take on more area than they should and don't prepare the soil properly. The result is lackluster. They squander their resources."

If you're just starting out with a home garden, Smith recommends keeping it to a small area, either a series of containers or a small patch (say, 4 feet by 8 feet). "What you'll find is that you can produce more than you think in a small space," says Smith.

If you want volume, "it's all about crop rotation," he says. "You don't have to back a tractor into your backyard and rip it all up."

Another problem is overcrowding the plants, Gilbertie says: "You'll get more production out of six tomatoes planted 3 feet apart than out of 12 tomatoes planted 18 inches apart."

Finding out just how much room each plant needs is easy, Gilbertie says. Hit the Internet, consult your seed catalogues or chat with the folks at your gardening center.

"The world's very best fertilizer -- 100 percent, tested for 10,000 years -- is compost," says Eliot Coleman, author of "Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long." "And it's made for free, in your backyard from waste products."

If you do nothing to it -- no equipment, no turning -- what goes into your compost pile will be ready to use in about six months, he says. Gardening doesn't have to be expensive, Coleman stresses. "You can do this without spending any money at all."

If you buy, look for compost "that is loose enough but has the nutrient value that you can mix with your soil," says Gilbertie. Enriching ingredients can include everything from oyster shells or fish to bark, peat moss or sphagnum moss.

Another good fertilizer is manure. It "will also add to the composition and will give you what you need so that these plants really take off," Gilbertie says. And "it goes a long way."

Look for certification from the Organic Materials Review Institute, or OMRI, he says.

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