Looking to save time and effort in your garden? These DIY garden hacks offer ingenious solutions to common gardening problems, helping you make the most of your space and resources.
Containers enable expansion of growing areas to spaces such as patios and balconies. Have you noticed how when you water your pots that potting mix can sometimes seep out of the drainage holes creating a bit of a mess? Well the simple solution is to pop a coffee filter paper into the bottom of your container, then you can fill your container as normal with your potting mix. Now the beauty of this is that excess water can still of course drain out but the potting mix can’t so that will keep everything squeaky clean.
Kitchen Ingredients for Plant Growth
Don’t throw out kitchen ingredients that are past their best; use them in the garden to boost plant growth.
- Milk can be used as a natural fertilizer. Just add it to the soil and then just lightly fork it in to incorporate it.
- Milk is also excellent used against powdery mildew. Now mix the milk one part milk to 10 parts water and then spray it all over the leaves and that will really help with any mildew problem.
Flour is actually a good source of nitrogen as well as lots of other micronutrients such as calcium, making it a great choice for leafy crops. Now you can just spread this over the soil surface a couple of weeks before planting or just add your flour in thin layers to the compost heap. Now don’t forget that any uncooked plant-based kitchen scraps can of course be composted and they all contain lots of nutrients so don’t waste them, recycle them back onto your garden.
Smart Watering Techniques
One of the easiest ways to help recent transplants of thirsty plants such as say squash is to bury a pot next to the plant and then water into that. Now that contains the water nicely and then it drains through the drainage holes at the bottom exactly to where it’s needed, to the roots.
An even more effective alternative is to gouge holes into a bottle. Now when you bury it make sure that the holes are facing the plant and they’re on the same side of the roots and that way they’ll be exactly where they’re needed and the roots will be able to grow towards the water source. Then you can just filter through the neck of the bottle and it’ll drain right through. And if you want to keep this extra safe for wildlife around then just keep the top of the bottle and pop it on the top so nothing can fall in.
Convenient Composting
If you don’t have much space for composting then just dump weeds, trimmings and old crops onto paths. Now in the same way that wood chips will rot down over time, so, obviously will all of this organic matter and once it has you can just use your spade to scrape up the compost and dump it back onto your beds for future crops. This is the ultimate in convenient and some might even say, lazy composting.
Efficient Watering Methods
Watering by hose pipe can take longer than it should, especially when water pressure is low during say periods of peak demand in the summer. That’s certainly the case in our area anyhow. So as an alternative fill up water barrels – if it’s run out of rain water fill up water barrels with main’s water and then dip in watering cans and water with them instead. Dipping cans into a barrel of water takes mere seconds and once the barrel is empty you can just leave it to refill with hose, go off and do other gardening jobs and it’ll be filled up by the time you get back, but please do keep a regular eye on it cause you don’t want to be wasting any of this precious resource.
Seedling Protection
Small seedlings are more vulnerable to pests such as slugs cutworms and birds than established seedlings. So the solution is simple: start them off away from the main part of the garden in a protected area in plug tray and pots. Plants are easier to protect in this way and you’ll be helping them through the most perilous early stages of their life. When it’s time to plant them bigger, sturdier plants that are better able to stand up to a pest attack or that are simply of no interest to pests anyway will be available.
Homemade Cold Frame
If you don’t have a cold frame then make your own from a salvaged window pane popped onto a frame made of straw bales. Now straw bales are fab because they offer such good insulation, creating a cozy environment inside perfect for overwintering plants or bagging an extra early start on the growing season. And once the growing season finally gets underway repurpose those bales to create a sheltered kind of wind break around recent transplants such as squash. And then after that, use them to create raised beds to grow plants in.
Vegetable Washing Station
Making a little vegetable washing station can help keep things tidy. All that’s simply done is attaching this wire mesh to a frame. Now a frame can be made using sort of two by two batons of wood and then simply hammer wire mesh on with u-shaped pins. Now it’s a pretty rudimentary structure but produce can be put on there and then very easily washed. If you’re in a water stressed area then you could collect the water and then dump that onto the garden or just wash these vegetables over an actively growing crop.
Blade Guard Hack
A very simple way to make a new blade guard can be done using foam pipe insulation. Now cut this to size and put one bit on each side of the blade. Now to hold this in place – very important if you got young kids running around – you could use a bungee cord. This method would work very well for any kind of nun folding knife for example or pruning saws; anything like that that’s around and you want to keep nice and protected. Stay safe folks.
Seed Storage Solutions
Tic Tac cases make really robust and reusable seed stores. Just add seed, whether it’s saved seed or seed leftover and then write the date on the front of when either harvested the seeds or when the seeds were packed, pop the lid on and then store these in a cool dry place. And if you can, why not pop in one of these little silica gel packets as well and that help to keep everything nice and dry. And the beauty of these is they stack beautifully. Nice little solution.
