5 Gardening Tips and Ideas that Actually Work

If you're like me, you've probably seen all those crazy weird gardening hacks here on YouTube that are kind of nonsense. So what I figured I would do is as an actual gardener give you five to seven tips that I know work and I'll explain exactly why they work for the garden. So let's go ahead and get into it. Tip number one, using felt pots or smart pots. These things are a lifesaver, especially as an urban gardener. I've got potatoes in these right now. Now basically what these are is they're a very lightweight foldable container to grow your plants in. And so especially for an urban gardener with small space, especially growing something like potatoes, what I can do is while the potatoes are still rooting and throwing up those shoots, they really don't need to be in the sun. So I throw them in my side yard that doesn't get any sun. As soon as they need to move out here, pick up the felt pot, throw it out here and you're good to go. Another reason why you like the felt pots is they basically prevent any sort of water logging issues, especially with the root crop. But really any plant is not going to like having wet feet as they call it. And so the felt pots will effectively help to air prune the roots by making sure that water doesn't just stay soaked up and soggy in there. I've found them to be extremely effective even compared to a five gallon bucket. So as you can see, I have potatoes in various different stages here and these are performing and in fact outperforming my in ground potatoes as well as outperforming my raised bed potatoes just slightly. And I want to say part of the reason for that is my ability to move them into the sun as well as my ability to do two more things that I really like about the felt pots. Number one, you can fold them down. So the edges of these pots right here are slightly folded down and that's because when the sun comes in like this, as you can see, the sun is starting to hit the canopy of these potatoes over here from this angle. But if I had the felt pot all the way up, then that felt edge would block the sun, which obviously is not good. Your plants need to photosynthesize. So I like to roll them down and roll them up as the plant grows to give them full access to sun. The other thing I like to do is also just turn them 180 degrees every day. So tip number one, really make use of felt pots. They're super cheap, super portable, lightweight, endlessly reusable and they make sure that your plants don't get too wet. Tip number two is gardening without gloves. I don't know about you guys. I don't really like to use gloves. I love feeling the dirt in my hands, working with the plants as delicately as possible. And in fact, I don't even think I got my first pair of gloves for maybe a few years into my gardening life. So what I like to use is Workman's Friend Barrier Skin Cream. Workman's Friend is the sponsor of this video. And what I thought I would do is I would apply it to one hand and not the other. Now what's really cool about it is not only does it protect from things like poison ivy, et cetera, but also moisturizes your hand and you can just wipe it clean. So it's almost like a virtual glove. So we're going to put it on my left hand. And what I'll do is go through the rest of our tips and then we will go ahead and see exactly how well it worked. Now the one thing that I noticed with this is you do have to make sure and get complete coverage as well as underneath your fingernails. You know, as a gardener, that's probably how everyone knows you're a gardener. They look at your fingernails and they say, okay, this dude is kind of a filthy mess. Definitely had that happen to me before. So just go ahead and apply the whole thing. You give it a little bit of time to dry, maybe three to five minutes. We're going to go through the rest of our gardening tips and at the end of the video, we're going to wipe it off and see exactly how well this hand is protected compared to this hand. Tip number three, instead of putting gravel at the bottom of your container pots, which are really common recommendation, try putting a cut up old sponge. Now the reason why gravel doesn't work as well as people think is effectively what it does is it just raises the bottom of your pot higher. Sure, it does drain out a little bit, but honestly it really doesn't work as well as you would think for increasing drainage. There's plenty of better ways to do that. Now, a sponge on the other hand does help you quite a bit because it's going to soak up water and then it will release it via capillary action when the soil dries out enough to need that water. So effectively what you're doing is you're turning a normal container into a self-watering container, obviously up to a certain point. So let's cut this sponge up, we'll put it in the bottom here, and then we'll repot this beautiful Neon Pothos plant, which I just picked up to round out my Pothos collection. So there we have it. We have a beautiful Neon Pothos plant that's been potted up with about maybe an inch or two of chopped up sponge instead of gravel. Still going to allow a nice amount of drainage out of the bottom hole here. As you can see, there's even some water coming out right now. However, as compared to gravel, those sponges will actually release water upwards via capillary action into the soil mix. So you won't need to water this anywhere near as often. So it's a really clever way to do a self-watering system that doesn't require you to buy any fancy parts or tools. Tip number four is if you have plastic bottles, now I wouldn't recommend going and buying any for this purpose because we should all be using as little plastic as we can. But if you do have some, or maybe you can pick some up from a neighbor that they're otherwise going to get thrown into the trash, then you can use them as a miniature greenhouse to protect little seedlings or as sort of a garden cloche to either speed up the growth of a plant if it needs a little bit warmer soil or temperatures or just to protect from like birds, squirrels, et cetera. So what I like to do is you can actually use this bottle twice. So I come in down here and cut off this section. The top is really nice for young seedlings that are pretty small because the top basically comes in with built-in ventilation. So you don't want to overheat them, right? So you can put the top on a small little seedling like this. You can see it right there. This one here, you can cut a couple of ventilation holes into the bottom of it like this. Cause you don't want, you don't want to cook your seedlings. And for a taller plant that might be somewhat susceptible to pest pressure, then you can go ahead and place it on top of one like that. And so one bottle, two uses as a garden cloche or a DIY mini greenhouse. Tip number five, it's another container gardening tip. We talked about the sponges, but coffee filters can also be a pretty good way to prevent crazy amounts of drainage out of the drainage hole while still actually allowing drainage in the first place. I really don't ever use containers that don't have a drainage hole because really with containers, almost always the number one problem a gardener runs into is overwatering. So you're causing root rot. The roots have wet feet effectively and really not a good scenario. So what I like to do is I throw a simple coffee filter in there. I'm a bougie coffee snob, so I have my little pour over filters here. But you can just pop that in there, shove it down a little bit, pot it up with soil. And then what happens is this little piece of coffee filter right here will block most of the massive amounts of runoff, especially because you're going to run that dirt off into either your saucer or if you're doing this without a saucer, which I don't recommend, you will have all sorts of dirt just like running out of your drainage hole. So this prevents the dirt from coming out, still allows the water to come out. So to prove it, let's go ahead and sprinkle some seed starting mix in here. Then we'll take our hose and we will dump some water in. And you can see only the water's coming out, which is, that's exactly what we want. So boom, coffee filter. Filter's out your soil too. We might start calling them a soil filter over here at Epic Gardening. Coffee filter, really good idea. Don't think I forgot about these hands guys. This one has Workman's Friend Barrier Skin Cream on it. This one has nothing on it, just bare bones, my normal hand. But I really didn't get them as dirty as I would have wanted while doing these tips. So I figured I would plunge them in for a while and just really grind them up and pretend like I'm really working the soil. And then we'll do the wipe off test and see exactly how well my Gardening Without Gloves tip actually works. So let's go ahead and get dirty. Just grinding it up. Okay. I'm going to like try to get it under my fingernails, rub it on my hands. Let's see, let's see, let's see, let's see. So I actually was on a podcast with my friend, Dr. Mark Merriweather-Vorderbruggen, who is a formulation chemist and actually developed the Barrier Skin Cream, which is really cool. But he's also an epic forager. And what he said is it's really effective to use if you're out there foraging, because especially for me as a beginner forager, sometimes I don't know my poisonous plants or my, my ivies or my poison oaks from one another. I haven't really done that so much yet. And so to risk getting that versus just applying something like this and making my life a whole lot easier seems like the obvious choice, especially when they're pretty darn cheap. Okay. So I think we have efficiently dirtied up our hands. Let's go ahead and see. Those are some dirty hands, guys. Alrighty. Barrier Skin Cream hand, the normal hand. Actually this one even looks like it has a little more dirt on it. So let's go ahead, give these a rinse and see what the results are. Okay. I just did a preliminary like little squeeze with my hands and you can already see it's definitely much cleaner over here than it is over here. Let's give it a quick little wash. Rinse. Pretty even there. Pretty even. Now the wipe test. So I've left a little section here. Let's wipe this. Okay. This section here should be a one wipe. Yeah, that's way better. So this one, you kind of have to dig in there and get all the little bits and pieces out. Even that's a couple of wipes. Here's a section right here. One wipe and it's perfectly clean. And honestly it feels really good too. Feels nice and smooth. Okay, let's go ahead and check our fingernail test. So in here we've definitely got some dirty fingernails. Come through and we'll give those a nice little clean wipe. Not bad. Here, definitely again, some dirty fingernails. Actually I'm going to polish that part off real quick first. It feels like it's just sliding right off. And then finally we'll come through and we'll just do a quick. So as long as your fingernails are short, works just fine. Works really good. Well, there are my five tips for today. I've got plenty more in the backlog of gardening tips that actually work and the reasons why they work instead of these crazy tips you'll get on the internet sometimes. The last thing I wanted to say is if you do want to try Workman's Friend out, there's a $2 off code. It's WFEPICGP. So you can use that. Again, thanks to them for sponsoring the video. Helps me get more content out like this to you guys. And if you have any more tips of your own, leave them in the comments down below. I definitely want to do some more of these quick tip type videos. As you can see there's tons of stuff growing in my garden, so I'm filming lots of content for that. But plants have to grow. It takes some time to do that. So until next time guys, good luck in the garden, keep growing, and I'll see you in the next one.