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'd like the felt
pots is they basically prevent any sort of water logging issues,
especially with a 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 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 inground 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, 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. And 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 is a 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. [inaudible] 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. Because 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 ventilation
holes into the bottom of it like this cause you don't want,
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
with 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 pourover 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 is coming out, which is, that's exactly what we want. So boom,
coffee filter. Filters 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've wanted while doing these tips. So I figured I would
plunge them in for a while. 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 and 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, it
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. It feels nice and smooth. Okay, let's
go ahead and check our fingernail test. So in here you'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. [inaudible].
