Me and my husband own a landscape business and we only use free marketing. Would you like to exchange ideas?
Leannmax

Can you advise me on how to generate free traffic to my website?

You can get many threads here which talks about how to generate traffic -
SEO of your web pages so that if you can get a decent ranking by the search engines, and thus, to pull people to your website by it relevance. Or can try word of mouth tools like tell a friend widgets to drive traffic from your existing traffic.

Mackone is right as far as getting search engine optimization to work for you. Word of mouth is the best form of marketing that exists on the web ... It gets buzz going about your business while building backlinks (links to your website from other sites on the 'net) all at one time. (And backlinks are a critical component of how your site ranks in the search engines.)

How do you do this? Post on forums in your niche. Comment on blogs in your niche. Post good, valuable content that makes you sound like a leader in your industry and earns you a reputation among your peers and the type of people who would be your future/prospective clients. Don't shamelessly plug your site, but use forum signatures where they're available, and let others know that you have this site.

Do this a little every day. Be consistent. After a couple of months, you'll have a positive reputation (and so will your company) for knowing your stuff and being friendly and helpful, you'll have links from other sites in the industry pointing to your website (which helps your search engine ranking), and you might even end up with a few clients outta it.

there are a lot of ways to promote your website for free (like link exchange or word of mouth etc) or very cheap ways (like paid to read or paid to click ...) to get search engine rank it is so good to start promoting your website for free for the first few months because you fix your weakness and problems without losing money .
but as long as you get rank in first page of a search keyword you cant hold on to it anymore and you have to start paying because when you get on the first page of a keyword you are a competitor for the others and if you dont advertise they will advertise to get you out of competition i think taking a part in sem( search engine marketing ) is absolutely necessary for your websites success .
and the other thing is choosing your keywords to optimize your websites on it you can find out more about keywords on http://adword.google.com choose keywords that has less competitors and more demands if you have less competitors you have more chance to get your website to first page but for the first 3 you definitely have to advertise
I've optimized this post for the word "you"

It's http://adwords.google.com

I would also suggest offline advertising.

I know that this is not free. However, it can be very cheap. And it would work well for something like landscaping, since you could target certain geographical areas.

Now that you've got a website to explain what the business is about, you don't need to put all that information on the flyer. A 4 line ad with a clear description of the service, a phone number and the URL in bold would be enough to get some interest. All you need is to get some people to type that URL into the browser, after all. These could be produced at a fraction of the cost of more traditional promotional material, where all the material is on the flyer itself.

Traffic from SE is very important and it converted, that's why, focus on your targeted keyword, promote it and build more quality backlinks. For advertising, you can use free ads sites like Craigslist.

Do the basics in SEO:

Directory submissions
Submit to social bookmarking sites
Exchange Links
Forum postings (use sig links)
comment posting/article submissions (blogs)
Post on Craigslist

Link to relevant sites / categories.
Link to sites with good PR value.
Link to sites with good (not Alexa based) traffic.

These are just few of the many ways you can generate traffic. Hope it helps.

it is fine that you look at a idea for your business.
you can built a good website about your business and submit important information about your business. and you take google adwords.