My frugal mulches are:

wood chips dropped off for free from landscape companies, wood mulch (pretty nice stuff, actually,) free from my town, and leaves from my trees.

Happy gardening,
cantstop

I've heard that wattle seed pods make a good mulch at the right time of year. And Allocasuarina 'needles' are good value, too.

Seaweed is brilliant, but the bull kelp can be a bit fragrant as it rots down, even under cover. Still, it's not for long.

Lawn clippings worked well for me this past summer, in the roses. Really held the weeds down.

I used all of my clippings as additional mulch - i cut back all of my cannas, my ginger lilies, etc, once we hit really cool/cold temps - and layered the greenery in one of my flower beds - it will help to eventually amend the soil in it. I also use newspaper up under my mulch - and cardboard boxes.

In my vegetable gardens I use a layer of newspaper with grass on it. It works beautifully. YOu can turn it all into the soil at the end of the season.

We used to live on a lake in a township. Between free mulch from the town chippers, and the water weeds from raking our swimming beach, we got the perfect combo of wet, green, dry, brown.
If anyone lives near a lake that has a weed harvester, you can request the chopped stuff for mulch, no matter what state you live in.
Now I live on a city lot, so have my gardener guy bag and dump the clippings so I can mix them with soil, bales of straw and free mulch from the city recycling place.
Where theres a will, theres a way, right?
Hey, it isnt even about being frugal. It is all about re-cycling and not stuffing landfills with perfectly usable products. Better, actually, than the boughten stuff.
Pondy

Couple of years ago they were trimming trees along the powerlines in our rural area and chipping the branches as they went. I stopped and asked what they did with the chips......ended up with 17 truckloads of free chip!! Wish they needed trimmed again.........

I wish they would do that with tree trimmings in my yard! Hmmm...i may have to do some checking!

Hi - new here from TN. Around here, the tree trimming company will leave a load of tree trimmings if you can catch them. Big but though. We have to be sure to ask if they have been cleaning out kudzu - oh boy - not even one leaf can come across our property line. How do you plant kudzu on a driveway? Drop a cutting and run like heck!

Anyway, we have a broom handle company in town (yes, brooms have to be made somewhere!) and I think DH said he paid $5 for a pickup truck load of handle shavings. He had to load it himself but WOW! you can't beat the price.

I've always wanted to do the free mulch from the tree companies and the power company, but I'm afraid of termites in it, especially from the tree companies, because they remove dead and diseased trees all the time. With the power company, it's mostly stuff they clip away from the right-of-ways, so it's probably not bad, but still, I'm afraid of termites, since I live in a frame house.

:) lovey, there's a company called Gardens Alive that originally made its fortune with kelp-based fertilizer (finally, something that works as well as fish emulsion, and doesn't smell like, well, fish emulsion!)

so you're not just frugal- you're also cutting- edge with the mulch :)

Everytime I go to the feed store I ask if I can have the hay "droppings". Whenever people buy bails of hay tons of it drops to the ground during loading. Its unsellable by the feed store and just needs to be cleaned up anyway. As long as I'm buying something (usually alfalfa pellets) they let me take as much as I want of this stuff. I almost always get a full pickup truck load of it free.

Call your local utility company. Usually, they have a program where their tree companies tha trim the right-of-ways will deliver the chips to your yard.

This isn't very pretty mulch, especially here in Florida where it can have palm fronds chopped up in it, but it's great for pathways.

Yes, in Sacramento, the utility company mulch also has fronds in it. Not chopped very small though. The fronds must wind through the blades and come out unmarred, I think. It's a bit of a hassle, but still worth it anyway.

I've been shredding paper for the garden, then covering with grass clippings. The shredded paper tangles together and does a better job of staying put.

I collected some old carpet from the side of the road the other day to put out around the hedgerow. I'm going to do the Roundup first, then the carpet, then free city mulch over that. No one much sees it, so it doesn't have to be pretty.