If you love keeping your garden looking beautiful, but you sometimes find that it takes too much work, you’ll love these simple gardening hacks that will save you time and money and ensure that you always have an amazing garden to look upon and enjoy spending time in.
Water with a Wine Bottle
Once very useful gardening hack concerns nothing more than a used wine bottle and a terracotta stake. Simply fill the wine bottle with water, attach the stake to the opening and plant it into the soil of your plant pots and it will very slowly water the plants, keeping the roots moist and healthy. This is great for indoor plants when you’re going away and outdoor plants when there’s a dry spell and you don’t want to be out watering your plants all the time.
Hydroponic Systems
If you’ve run out of growing space and you want to start a veggie patch, or you want to keep your garden pristine with pretty flowers, but you would like to grow some of your own food, check out Nutriculture and their range of hydroponic systems that will enable you to grow very healthy, nutritious fruits and veggies without taking up precious garden space, using a water-based system that you won’t even have to get your hands dirty for.
Sprinkle Cinnamon
Not only is cinnamon delicious when baked into an apple pie or sprinkled on your coffee, but it is also a powerful anti-fungal and can prevent diseases from occurring when sprinkled on your seedlings too.
Brew Some Coffee
Another delicious consumable that you can put to great use in your garden is coffee… well, coffee grounds anyway. They are fabulous for keeping critters like snails, slugs and ants away from your precious plants, so you no longer have to worry about spending hours planting them only for them to be eaten and destroyed by pests. They can even be used as a fertilizer too.
Use Ladders as a Plant Stand
If you’re out of space, but you have more plants to display, find an old ladder and use it as you would any plant stand. Paint it white and distress it and it'll become a quirky garden feature in its own right, Old bicycles with baskets are another ingenious alternative to the plant stand too.
Citrus Peel Power
Lemon peel is the ideal substance for feeding new seedlings. When your seeds are ready to be transplanted from pot to the garden, throw a little lemon peel in with them and the peel will feed your little seedlings as it decomposes, ensuring that they grow healthy, strong and beautiful.
Vinegar Kills Weeds
If you’re looking for a natural, pet-safe way to get rid of those pesky weeds that shoot up and ruin your carefully curated garden design, look no further than the condiment cupboard. Plain old kitchen vinegar can get rid of them in a flash, and help to keep them at bay once they’ve gone, too.
A Little Honey Goes a Long way
Honey is a fantastic substance for the propagation of cuttings because it contains enzymes that promote the growth of roots. That means you can use it to plant cuttings and keep the roots safe from fungus and other bacteria at the same time.
Nappy Your Hanging Baskets
It may sound really weird, but putting nappies into your hanging baskets is a great way to keep them looking healthy and ensure that your flowers last a long time. Why? It’s simple really -nappies retain a whole lot of moisture and moisture helps to keep plants and flowers in hanging baskets or shallow pots, healthy and humid. They’re particularly useful when the weather is hot.
Cooking Water is a Great Fertilizer
The water that you’ve used to cook veggies and eggs is packed with nutrients that have leached out of the food during the cooking process, that means that it is an excellent plant fertilizer. Using cooking water means that you waste less water overall too, and that is great for the environment.
Use Cans for Drainage
Looking for a way to use those old baked bean and cola cans? Place them in the bottom of deep planters so that you don’t need to use as much soil, and so you have an inbuilt drainage system that will help to keep the soil, and your plants much healthier.
Gardening can be great fun, but there’s nothing wrong with cutting a few corners to make life a little easier. Spend less time doing and more time enjoying your outdoor space!
