If gardening is a passion of yours, then you’re probably always on the lookout for some new tricks.
There’s a lot more that goes into keeping your garden in good shape than people realise. Way more than just the basics.
Keeping plants alive and having a garden that looks nice is all well and good, but actually having a thriving garden is a different story.
There’s lots of little things that you pick up with practice, or by talking to other gardeners, but there’s always going to some new idea for you to discover.
Here’s 5 of those gardening hacks that you probably haven’t thought of before…
Keep your plants watered while you’re away
We’ve all been through this before. You’ve got a vacation coming up, you’re going to be away from your house for a little while.
You’re probably looking forward to it, but what you’re not looking forward to is putting your garden in someone else’s hands.
Even if you can convince someone to take the time every couple of days or so to come to your house and water your plants, they may not be experienced gardeners.
You can solve this problem with just a few paper towels and a glass of water though. This only really applies to indoor plants and greenhouses, but that’s how a lot of gardener’s do it today.
It’s as simple as rolling up a paper towel as tightly as possible and laying one end on the soil and the other as deep into a glass of water as possible.
The water will spread evenly onto the soil and keep the plants watered. Do this with every plant and you’re good to go.
Use Hydrogen Peroxide on your soil
The name sounds a tad bit scary I must admit. It doesn’t really sound like something that you’d want near your plants.
Trust me though, Hydrogen Peroxide is actually useful for your garden in a couple of different ways. In fact, gardening is one of many things that this compound is unexpectedly useful for.
Chiefly, it will keep away certain diseases. Sometimes your plants can be affected by fungal diseases such as root rot and this can occur completely out of nowhere.
When it happens, it’s disastrous and it will kill your plants fast. You can prevent this if you spritz the soil with a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution every once in a while.
Doing this can also help new seeds to sprout early in their development. Use the same solution we talked about on the seeds every time you moisten the soil and it should speed up sprouting.
Use Diapers to improve moisture-retention
No seriously. Diapers. You might not even want to believe it but you would be shocked at how helpful implementing diapers into your gardening can be.
This is especially useful if you’re living in a particularly warm climate, where it’s more difficult for your plants to retain moisture.
What you’ll want to do, is place the diapers at the bottom of your pot with the absorbent side facing upwards. This is more effective if your pot isn’t particularly shallow.
Fill the pot with soil and then plant away. As we all know, diapers are designed to absorb moisture and so that’s exactly what they’ll do.
This should keep your soil good and wet for quite a long time so even in those warm areas you won’t have to worry as much.
Dispose of weeds using vinegar
Weeds. Ugh, I hate the word, it’s probably the least favourite word of most gardeners and there’s good reason why.
These irritating things just keep growing and growing. You can’t look away from your garden for two seconds without the whole thing being overrun with weeds.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration of course but you know what I mean. They’re everywhere and when they show up the usual solution is to manually pull them from the ground.
That’s just frustrating and it takes up time. You can make a quick vinegar based concoction that will easily do away with any weed that infest your garden.
Just mix some regular kitchen vinegar with a cup of salt and a few tablespoons of dish soap, put that in a sprayer and then you’re just a few spritz away from a weed-free garden.
It will destroy your other plants to if any gets on them so be careful where you spray it. Solutions like this that use household items are good to know because you can avoid spending too much.
Things like weedkiller would get the job done but it’s costly. There’s many ways to cut costs when you’re gardening, and because weeds affect us all this is a universally beneficial trick.
Keep pests at bay with eggshells
So like weeds, pests are another problem that most of us have dealt with in our gardens at some time or another.
You’ve got pests like slugs, snails, caterpillars and many, many others that can affect your garden and it’s just infuriating.
Eggshells are a good way to keep them at bay. If you finely crush up eggshells and sprinkle the pieces all over your plants, slugs, snails and caterpillars will all stay away.
These creatures do not want to risk the sharp edges of the eggshells and so they’ll avoid any plants covered in them.
There’s a few other different things that you can try here with varying levels of success. Like companion planting is something that’s supposed to be effective.
But that takes a certain amount of planning and you might not be interested in all of those specific plants, whereas using eggshells is pretty straightforward.
Conclusion
Keeping a garden in shape isn’t easy. There’s a lot different things that can get in the way of your plants thriving.
It’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the responsibilities that pile up when you’re trying to keep the garden in check but there’s ways to make it easier.
Having a wide knowledge of useful hacks and tricks like these ones, can make taking care of your garden that little bit more convenient.
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