From tying a bucket to your bottom for a highly portable weeding seat to using old bras to support melons on the vine, there are some pretty crazy gardening hacks out here.
We’ve weeded out the wheat from the chaff to give you 12 of our favourites. From the seemingly absurd to the commonsense, all are designed to make gardening a little bit easier.
1. Place pots within pots
Perfect for capricious or indecisive gardeners is the pot-within-a-pot scheme, whereby empty plastic plant pots are sunk into the garden bed. Then, a same-sized pot already containing a plant is simply slotted into the buried pot. Hey presto, an instant garden and one easily changed by lifting out the top pot and replacing it with another. That colour scheme doesn’t work? Just shuffle the upper pots around. Plant looking tatty? Biff it and pop in another. Just ensure the rim of the pots is covered in soil to avoid your ruse being uncovered.
2. Use biodegradable seedling containers
Biodegradable seed trays make transplanting seedlings into the garden a breeze. Instead of risking damaging delicate roots by pulling them out from plastic trays, the seedling containers are simply buried and will decompose as the seedlings grow.
Cut cardboard toilet paper cylinders and paper towel rolls into 10cm or so lengths, then arrange them in a waterproof tray – old shallow cake-slice baking tins from op-shops are perfect. Fill with a seed-raising mix, sow and plant the whole tube when the seedlings are big enough. Egg cartons are also great. Organic options include egg shells and citrus skin halves; the former need crushing at planting out time. The latter perform better with a hole cut into them for drainage and are best suited to acid-loving plants such as capsicums and radishes.
3. Transform your garden with a shower curtain
Bid adieu to ugly or boring walls or fences. Transform them with shower curtains, depicting realistic outdoor scenes. No longer is your garden blighted by a dull aluminium shed; now you can gaze upon a picturesque shuttered Greek cottage smothered in bougainvillea; that tatty paling fence can become a shingle path leading deep into a mysterious forest.
While some of the hangings do just look like shower curtains, clever gardeners can blend them in with garden furniture and real plants, both in pots and in the ground, with surprisingly natural results (from a distance at least). Check out the Facebook Shower Curtain Gardeners group for some stunning – and not-so-stunning – examples. Naff or nifty, you decide.
4. DIY planters with nags of potting mix
The easiest way to grow tomatoes is to buy a bag of vegetable potting mix and lie it down somewhere sunny. Then, with a sharp knife, slit the bag lengthways, stopping about 12cm from each end. Peel back the plastic and pop in the tomato plants, depending on the size of the bag there will be room for up to three. Give each plant a stake, and water and enjoy all that time you might otherwise have spent preparing the soil and weeding.
5. Reduce, reuse and recycle your old cottons
Stretchy fabrics such as old T-shirts, leggings and pantyhose make the best plant ties. Soft and flexible, they don’t cut into the plant. Because they can be cut to the desired size they are suitable for all sized plants – from tomatoes to shrubs. The standard figure-eight tie method lessens potential harm to the stem and, keeping it and the stake apart, reduces friction damage. To create: wrap the strip around the stem, cross it over itself and tie it to the support. Tie loosely – just tight enough to support the plant.
6. Thumbs up for handy garden accessories
When your fingernails just aren’t up to the job and scissors and knives are too awkward to carry around the garden, it’s time to summon the thumb knife. This silicon cap slips over the thumb and has an embedded blade, meaning a knife is always, literally, at your fingertips, and ready for snipping stems or string, plucking citrus or whatever else you may need to slice through. Wisely, it is paired with another to slip over the forefinger and protect it from the thumb blade. Available from Etsy.
Gardening Thumb Knife, $51.18, from Etsy
7. Fork off meddling pets
Put an end to pesky cats doing their business on your garden beds with disposable bamboo kitchen forks. Insert them, 10cm to 15cm apart, into bare ground around plants, handles down and with the prongs poking above the soil surface. The handles will anchor them so firmly into the ground that it would take a mighty strong or determined cat to dislodge them. Country gardeners will appreciate that the forks may also deter rabbits from nibbling on their precious new shoots and edible crops – or stop them from digging holes near them at least. And for those that way inclined, they can look like installation art.
8. Green, dream and transform with paint
Visitors are due any moment and you really want to impress them with your fabulous garden. All is looking beautiful but then, your heart curdles, the hedge is sporting a brown dying patch. It’s time to reach for Renew, a green spray paint, designed to cover up any ugly spots in foliage and lawns. Harmless to plants and staunch in the face of rain and irrigation, this chalk-based paint (unfortunately) comes in only one shade of green and in a matte finish. This makes it perfect for the dull green of a Leyland cypress but a poor match for bright, shiny taupata leaves. From a distance, it is always an excellent quick fix – and really, who would ever suspect you of such deception?
9. Put a sock in it
Improve on the old inverted water-filled, plastic soft-drink bottle irrigation hack by instead puncturing holes around the bottle and stuffing it with a sock or two – or similar fabric. Now, fill it with water, replace the cap and bury the bottle up the right way near the target plant. Water will gradually seep out to keep the plant roots moist. This happens more slowly than with the old inverted bottle method. Simply remove the cap to refill. Great during droughts, times of watering restrictions and when the gardener is absent.
10. Stabilise your tree with large rocks
Three or four large rocks placed around the base of trees after planting will help stabilise them and thus avoid damage to the roots from strong winds. It obviates the need for two stakes, which bigger trees otherwise should be tied to at planting time and which can be a real fiddle-faddle, and not always attractive. Place the rocks about 8-10cm away from the trunk. If arranged well they can enhance the vignette, as well as suppress weeds.
11. Try the hot pepper trick
Puny chillis and capsicums can be banished to the past and replaced by multiple hefty ones, courtesy of some household matchsticks. The same chemicals that help the little firesticks ignite – phosphorous and phosphorous sesquisulfide – are also those that help pepper plants develop buds and fruit. As well, phosphorous lifts soil acidity, definitely a plus for peppers. Insert into the soil, heads down, about 10 unused matchsticks in a ring with a 5cm radius around the seedlings. All peppers, from chillis to capsicums, will benefit from this hack that is almost as old as the matchstick itself.
12. (Toilet) paper trail
For ease of sowing of tiny seeds, such as carrots, parsnip, lobelia and snapdragons, make your own seed tape with toilet paper. Roll out a length on a flat surface, sprinkle the seeds down the middle taking care to space them out, then mist with water. Fold over one-third of the paper lengthways, mist again and fold over the third. Then simply lay in place, cover lightly with fine soil and spray mist again. Be vigilant in keeping damp at least until germination.
Text Mary Lovell-Smith
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