Speaking with other gardeners about their growing techniques is one of the pleasant aspects of gardening. Speaking with other gardeners about their tactics and suggestions for raising robust, healthy plants and keeping out pests is one of the enjoyable aspects of gardening.
Knowing the tricks to grow vegetables, flowers, shrubs, and trees adds a little creativity, even if sound plant culture is the foundation of any good garden. Here are a dozen gardening tips and tricks from a variety of sources that you can apply to improve your gardening abilities and wow your friends with your “Where did you learn that?” gardening know-how.
Before implementing them to significant portions of your garden, test them out first on a small number of plants, at your own risk!
Please post any hacks you may have in the comments area if we haven’t already covered them.
1 Aerate Your Garden
Experts in lawn maintenance advise aerating your grass at least twice a year. A similar approach would be beneficial for areas used for cultivating gardens. Make holes all over the garden using an auger bit on a cordless drill in the early spring before anything starts to grow.
Backfill some of these holes with angular gravel that is smaller in particle size than pea gravel, such as expanded shale or squeegee-sized gravel. Keep the other holes open; they will naturally fill in. ‘
The root zone will receive more oxygen when the holes are made. Increasing their longevity and bloom is particularly crucial for native plants in the Western hemisphere.
2. Add Coffee Grounds to Soil to Enrich It
Used coffee grounds are a great organic resource since they add nitrogen to compost piles and enhance the structure and tilth of the soil. Coffee grounds contain only 2% nitrogen by volume and are not acidic; since coffee’s acid is water-soluble, it is mostly present in your cup of coffee.
Add equal parts of leaves and grass clippings while composting coffee grounds. Add an equal amount of a carbon source, such as shredded paper or dried leaves, when adding them to a static compost bin.
Combine all ingredients thoroughly. While the soil is still moist, incorporate the coffee grounds (which will repel water when dried) while also adding nitrogen fertiliser. Because coffee grounds promote the growth of soil microbes, which require nitrogen for their growth and reproduction, adding nitrogen is crucial.
Coffee grounds may deter slugs and snails and attract earthworms, which considerably improve garden soils, according to anecdotal evidence.
3. Make Use of Eggshells.
Slugs can be deterred from grazing on your plants and veggies in your garden in a straightforward and natural approach if you experience a slug problem. Plants should be surrounded by crushed eggshells.
There is no special component in the shells that slugs dislike, nor is there a rational scientific basis for this trick. Instead, there is a very practical justification for employing the egg shell approach: Slugs dislike the crushed shells’ jagged edges.
In fact, the sharp edges will pierce their delicate bodies, killing them. Slugs, particularly those that live in the gloomy, moist areas of your garden, can do ugly damage to leaves and seedlings.
In well-watered gardens and after rainstorms, they are very active. They are drawn to ripening fruits and vegetables as well. Slug presence can be determined by slime trails.
4. Epsom Salt Is Good for You and Your Tomatoes.
It is well known that adding Epsom salt to bath water has positive effects on one’s health and appearance. Epsom salt gets its name from a salt spring in Surrey, England. The salt, which is actually not salt at all but a naturally occurring mixture of magnesium and sulphate, has a possibly less well-known application in gardens.
Because magnesium and sulphate are essential nutrients for plant growth, tomatoes benefit from the occasional addition of Epsom salt to help the fruit develop more properly. In Greenville, South Carolina, Michael Arnold of Stone Avenue Nursery said he had heard that putting Epsom salt around stressed plants might aid in their recovery.
5. Crawling Insects Can Be Easily Avoided.
Wrapping a collar of aluminium foil around tomatoes and squash will help ward off pesky animals that want to eat your produce before you do if you have a problem with crawling insects in your vegetable garden.
This approach is only a useful technique; it doesn’t entail any science like the eggshell hack above. Considering that many crawling insects dislike traversing metal, foil also has the added advantage of being slightly sharp. It serves as a physical barrier as well.
For instance, if you apply it to squash, the borer won’t be able to enter the base of the stem, where they usually make their entrance.
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6. Keep pots moist with wick watering.
There is a way to keep the roots of tropical and decorative plants that can die if the soil dries up too rapidly in small pots moist if you are a plant collector or a small-space gardener with many pots.
Using acrylic string or cord, wick water from old plastic food containers with lids or 2-litre plastic soda bottles. If you’re going on a short trip, you can even utilise this watering technique on larger pots.
The objective is to preserve soil moisture at levels that will satisfy plants by using capillary action to move water from a reservoir into the soil. Here’s how it operates (the video above has a few differences, but the fundamental ideas are the same):
Use about an 8-inch length of acrylic thread or yarn pushed up through the drainage hole in the bottom of the pot for smaller pots (4 to 6 inches). Several inches of the thread can be wrapped around the pot’s base at the time of planting.
If the plant is already potted, a pencil or crochet hook can be used to push the string several inches up into the drainage hole. The string should then hang from a small hole drilled into the pot’s lid and be positioned directly on top of the water container.
To effectively wick water up from larger pots, many lengths of thread tied together or a larger synthetic cable may be required. You can also use worn-out nylon pantyhose, old T-shirt strips, or polyester blankets.
Setting a 2-litre soda bottle or bucket next to the pot can work for really large and heavy pots. All you have to do is stick the other end of the wick into the soil of your pot and dangle the other end into your reservoir.
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7. Make compost piles serve two purposes.
Creating a hugelkultur garden as opposed to a conventional raised bed might be a simple introduction to permaculture. Hugelkultur gardens are made up of soil-covered mounds of decomposing wood.
When making this kind of bed, the more decayed the better, however, any degree of rot is acceptable. In essence, you are creating a soil-covered, long-term compost pile of wood. As soon as your mound is constructed, plant it like any other raised bed.
The nicest benefit of creating a hugelkultur mound is that you may stop using continual irrigation in addition to making excellent use of your yard waste as a resource.
The wood behaves like a sponge, soaking up rainwater and eventually releasing it into the soil around it.
Even during times of drought, it typically remains damp but not soggy. Are you concerned about watering your garden while you are away?
If you water a hugelkultur mound before you go, it should still be moist when you get back after a week or more. Even big planters and pots can be used for this.
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8. Create Your Own Soap that Kills Insects.
Dissolve 4 cups of water with 1 teaspoon of liquid dish soap. Spray on plants with spider mites, whitefly, aphid, or thrip infestations. A prophylactic measure is not insecticidal soap. It kills insects by smothering or dehydrating them and operates upon contact, thus the pest must come into contact with the solution for it to work.
Using insecticidal soaps to remove honeydew, sooty mould, and other detritus off leaves is another usage for them. Due to their low toxicity, insecticidal soaps are among the safest pesticides.