No-Cost Gift Ideas for Gardeners

Are you looking for a meaningful gift for a gardener in your life, but you’re short on funds? Here are 4 gift ideas that you can pull together with time and effort instead of money:

1. A Seed Starting Service:

This gift works best if you have seed starting supplies and some extra seeds. Offer your gardener friend a list of plants you can start for them and let them pick what plants they want.

Download this Seedling Order Form Template to get started!

2. Collected materials:

 From translucent milk jugs for winter sowing, to cardboard for weed suppression, there are plenty of ways to recycle “trash” into useful gardening materials. The loving effort in this gift is how long it takes to accumulate (and how much space it takes to store) just the right thing for the job. Make sure to clean, remove unwanted labels or tape, and add any necessary drainage holes. Other ideas:

• old vinyl blind slats cut down for use as plant labels
• single-serve yogurt cups or clear plastic clamshells for seed starting
• old sheets as frost coverings for sensitive plants
• newspaper for folded paper seed starting cups

3. Coupons or Vouchers for Future Help

Write down tasks that you could do for (or with) your gardener friend. You could help them with a garden plan (what to plant, where, when). You could also offer to help weed, transplant, or water.

Download this Garden Helper Voucher template to get started!

4. Personalized Reference Library

Across different university websites is a varied library of thousands of free gardening articles. The easiest way to find them is to add “extension” or “university” to your online searches for specific gardening topics. (An example search could be “growing blueberry extension”). Pay attention to where the university is located and how the regional climate might change an article’s advice. In general, most mid-west state’s extension publications are comparable to Indiana. Compile these articles into a reference guide that you can give to your gardener friend. This could be done digitally (with something like a Google drive) or in a physical binder.