Featured: Five Gardening Hacks to Make Maintenance Easier

Have you ever found yourself wishing desperately for an easy way to keep slugs from destroying your precious marigolds, or struggled to find a way to water your plants when your beloved watering can finally gives up the ghost? Well, look no further than these five handy gardening hacks that you can make with simple everyday objects!

Milk-Bottle Watering Can

We’ve all been there. Your watering can has given up, or simply disappeared. How are you meant to evenly distribute water throughout your plants if all you’re having to resort to is an empty bottle? Simple — grab an empty milk bottle and poke holes in the top!

To turn a milk bottle into a watering can, simply clean out an old milk bottle, and then take the lid. Most milk bottle lids will be flimsy enough for you to take a pin through. Poke holes evenly through the top of the lid, leaving the sides intact. Fill your milk-bottle-slash-watering-can with water, screw the lid back on and tip it up. Voila! Instant watering can.

Beer-Dish Slug Distraction

Slugs are the bane of every single gardener’s life. You can toil for hours, days, months on a seedling and bring it to fruition only to come out the following day to find that the slugs have arrived and have eaten every single little bit of your hard work. Disheartening, right? Well, there’s an easy way to distract them — beer. If you’re a slug-lover, this isn’t the hack for you, but it does help if you’ve got a major slug problem.

Simply fill a shallow dish with beer — it doesn’t even matter what kind, as long as it fills the dish. Sit it near to your plants. As beer smells sweet and attracts slugs, you’ll find them opting to drown in the booze rather than tear up your plants as the evening drops. Your plants stay slug-free, and all for a tiny dish of beer!

Plant-Pot Bee Baths

You’ve probably seen the signs around — save the bees! They’re incredibly important little creatures and without our help, they could die out in our lifetime. This would cause untold havoc to our infrastructure and besides, bees are super-cute — let’s help them out. As well as planting lots of colourful flowers, you can also help by creating a small bee-bath out of a few simple pieces of garden tools.

For this, you’ll need a plant pot and a small pot saucer. Turn the pot upside down. What you’re now looking to do is attach the saucer right-way-up to the bottom of the pot. This creates a standing structure with an area for water on the upper side. Take some small pot decoration stones or marbles and place them inside the saucer, and fill with a little water. The water allows bees to have a refreshing drink while they do their work and the stones allow for the bees to have water-free areas to land in. If you’re feeling especially crafty, you can paint your pot in bright colours to attract the bees.

Plant Seedlings in Eggshells

Ran out of pots? Can’t just grab another pot from the shed? Look no further than something we’d usually throw out — eggshells. You’ll need to ensure they’re completely clean before you plant, but they can give you a quick fix to a pot shortage.

To begin, carefully cut the narrow top of the eggshell open. Empty the insides from the egg into a bowl — it’s probably handy to cook something with the eggs! — and then boil the shells to remove any last traces of egg. Leave them to dry, and then carefully puncture a hole in the bottom of the egg. Once this is done, fill the shells with soil and place the seeds inside. Spray with water and you’ve got an instant seed incubator. This only works for seedlings, however — you will still need to plant the seeds into bigger pots when they begin to grow.

Pebble Seed Labels

If you’re like me, you just plant everything and worry about where things are later. Not the best idea, especially when it comes to trying to identify the vegetables from the flowers. That’s why it’s handy to identify your plants with labels, but the ones from the DIY or specialist stores can be expensive and boring. There’s a simple solution, though — pebble labels!

To create these, you’ll need some paints, a paintbrush, large pebbles and a ton of creativity! Paint the names of the plants onto the pebbles and leave them to dry, perhaps even painting a cartoon of the plant if you’ve got enough space. These pebbles will be hardier than the plastic labels bought from stores, and they’re also really cute too!

Special thanks to isak valtersen and losing control. for editing!