As of this afternoon, I have exactly one dollar left in the 2026 garden budget. I set it at $500 back in January and gave the rain barrel project its own separate line, and today's clearance run brought the garden total to $499. The budget is closed. The dollar stays where it is.
Last September I skipped the clearance aisles entirely, because I was already over that year's $450 budget, mostly thanks to the hardware cloth that keeps Gus out of the beans. This year I had $39 to play with and a short list in my notebook, written in August when I could see what was wearing out. Mateo came along, three days into middle school and tired of being asked how it's going.
What I bought
- Two 10-gallon fabric pots, marked down 50 percent to $9.99 each
- A stainless soil knife with a sheath, marked down 70 percent to $14.99
With tax it came to $37.90, which goes into the notebook as $38.
The fabric pots replace two of the nine that held peppers on the porch this summer. After a few seasons in full southwest sun, the seams on those two had thinned to almost nothing, and one handle tore off when I moved it to sweep. The other seven have another year in them. Fabric pots are one of the few things I buy new instead of scrounging, because the cheap ones fall apart in a season and the good ones cost real money at full price. Half off is the time.
The soil knife is for the after-school garden club. My own, the one I reach for every day, lives in my apron pocket, and every spring I end up lending it to a third grader who digs with it like it's a shovel. Now the club gets its own. It has inch marks on the blade for planting depth, and at $14.99 I won't mourn it if it ends up at the bottom of a school planter.
What I put back
Clearance is designed for people like me, tired at the end of summer and already daydreaming about next year. Here's what I picked up, carried around for a while and returned.
Japanese beetle bag traps, 70 percent off. Not even if they were free. They pull more beetles into the yard than they catch, so I hand-pick into soapy water instead.
A pallet of moisture-control potting mix, half off. I walked past it quickly. One bag of it in 2023 gave our basement a fungus gnat plague I still think about when I water seedlings.
A countertop growing unit, 60 percent off. It's a nice-looking thing. I already have a shelf of shop lights in the basement and herbs on the windowsill, and I don't need another appliance to plug in and dust.
A soil pH meter. Our soil test through the county extension in March ($36 for two samples) told me far more than a probe would.
Half-price perennials. A rack of coneflowers already gone to seed and black-eyed Susans with petals curling like old paper bags. Tempting, but the porch-side border is full, and I'd rather collect seed from my own.
A resin gnome reading a book. Mateo lobbied for this one hard. It was $6. I held firm, which I may regret.
The rule I used is simple: I only buy something that replaces a thing that's worn out, or fills a gap I wrote down before I walked into the store. If it isn't in the notebook, it doesn't go in the cart, no matter what the orange sticker says.
Where 2026 ended up
This year's garden spending of $499 covered seeds ($80), a third shop light and a heat-mat thermostat ($49), soil tests ($36), soil, compost and fertilizer ($98), pansies and violas ($20), native plugs ($57), the self-watering planter test ($63), deer spray, neem and insect netting ($58), and today's $38. Last year I spent $538 against $450. This year I set the budget higher on purpose and still came in under it, which feels better than it probably should.
Mateo, for the record, has already asked whether the gnome will still be there next September.
