We're back again to do
another one of these viral plant hack videos, and really hit it with the
experience of a gardener. Now I'm by no means some sort
of crazy expert master gardener, but I've got some seasons
under my belt and these videos, these Blossom videos, or what have you, which I think are really just some sort
of content farm that doesn't care about the accuracy at all. So I'm not trying
to say that they're making mistakes. I don't even think they care
that they're making mistakes. But I think they're fun to look at from
the perspective of a gardener to say why they're bad, because if you know
why they're bad, consequently, you know what's good. And then you build the mind of a gardener
and you can go into your garden and really get a sense for it. So this video is called "These
replanting hacks will make you grow crazy!" And you know it's gonna make
me go crazy. 2.4 million reactions, 288,000 comments and
5.3 million shares and 285 million views. That one video has more views than my
entire gardening channel, potentially, over every platform that I've ever
done. So a little demoralizing, but it's okay. Let's go ahead and get
into this. Links in the description. First of all, we're starting out
with a bell pepper. Okay. So that's, you can do that. You can't do
that. Well, here's the thing. When you're going to dry pepper seeds,
and I just gave away the answer, you don't want to just plant a
pepper directly in the ground. It's certainly possible.
You can do it with a pepper. You can do it with a tomato. But you're going to get better results
from saving your pepper seeds if you, again, scrape them out
of a mature pepper plant, allow them to dry and then you can
plant them at will wherever you want. The thing that's going to happen when
you do what I suspect is about to happen here, yeah, they just plant
the pepper is - first of all, that's a cucumber coming out. That's
a cucumber, so they're wrong there. But what's going to happen
is you have this sort of shell that won't break down that
fast, especially in a container. So it's probably going to cramp
the roots out a little bit. And also it's probably just a little too
much organic matter to put right there, at least in my opinion. Again, just starting the seed in a normal way
and saving that seed by letting it dry out and then preserving it
for use whenever you want
is probably a better move. Especially because you really don't
need to plant all the seeds within one pepper. That's just way too many
planted way too close together. Okay. Let's move on. Oh my God. Okay. So we've taken a fresh, what
looks to be a cooked cob of corn. And even if it's not,
maybe it's just a fresh, not completely mature ear of corn
and we have stabbed through the seeds with a stick. Well, there's nothing that's going to happen
here, but okay. Okay. Oh my God. That's kind of cool. It's kind of
a cool little time lapse there. I don't believe that's a, a corn growing.
I think it's an onion or something. So that's not gonna work because you've
damaged the seed and the seed wasn't viable in the first place because it
was too young. So number one problem, that's not the right time and/or
way to even plant it. Number two, it's not going to grow if you just jam
a stick through the actual thing that's supposed to create new life, right?
It doesn't make any sense. Okay, let's look at this one. We've taken a little bottle and
we've done this and then we, okay. So, right. So with garlic, you've got
your bulb and the bulb has cloves. Now what you normally do when you're
planting garlic is you separate those cloves off. Generally you plant the largest cloves
and you want to plant those maybe anywhere from four to six inches deep. It really depends on how
cold it gets in your area, because a lot of people will
plant garlic in the fall, let it overwinter and then
it comes up in the spring. It's a very long season crop. So
when you plant it in the fall, you allow it to sprout, you
allow those roots to develop, but you have to plant it deep enough and
mulch heavy enough that the root system is protected during the
winter. Then it will come up. And it's actually a really
fantastic way to plant garlic. And it turns out to be
relatively easy. Now this, I guess it works to
pre-sprout your garlic, but I don't know what the purpose would
be because I would much rather just plant that clove deep and allow all of
that to develop in the soil where it will always be instead of pre-sprouting
and then transplanting it in. It just doesn't seem to make sense
based on how garlic wants to be grown. Okay. So now we have a dragonfruit.
Oh you know I love a dragon fruit. So let's see if they don't botch
my favorite plant of all time. So we're separating the seeds
out. Okay. That's not so bad. And then yeah, I mean,
this is how you would, this is a way to germinate
dragonfruit seeds. Now the thing about dragonfruit seeds
is most everyone will grow dragonfruit from cuttings because it takes
so much longer to grow from seed. I went from cutting to three
successful fruits in about exactly 12 months, which is really
fast. If you're doing it from seed, that's probably going to be
three years minimum, I would say, because you have so much
plant tissue to grow. When you start from a cutting
you have a nice piece of stem, it can throw out roots and it can
start branching out really quickly. If you give it the right conditions,
you can get an Epic dragonfruit. Okay. Let's take a look at this walnut. Mmm. It looks like they've cracked it open, wet it to germinate it and then keeping
it moist. They have a little sprout, which there's, that's just like
a bean sprout I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure it's just a bean sprout,
but um, okay. Well, first of all, the thing with this is like you're growing
an entire tree and it's going to take years and years and years and years.
So that's not like some funky hack. Most people who are growing a tree like
this are just going to go to the nursery and buy an established tree, especially
because you get the variety you want, you get it grown from
someone who's reputable. And growing fruit trees from seed,
while possible and admirable, it takes a lot of your actual life. I mean if it takes 10 years,
let's say, let's take an avocado. It takes 15 years-ish to get that
to like really max production. You have like five cycles of starting
avocados from seed in an average human life. So just go to a nursery and shortcut
that a little bit instead of hacking. I mean, this hack should save
time, not, not take it right. Leek. One of my favorite alliums to
grow. Okay. So we've got a leek, you're taking the cut end, and
you're putting it in. First of all, I kind of like eating that
part personally. I just, I think the white section is really
flavorful, but this will work. This will definitely work. There's
nothing necessarily wrong with that. Although I would put it in soil,
I wouldn't put it in water. If you put it in water, all it's
getting is sunlight, water, oxygen. If you put it in soil, it's getting all those three plus
the nutrients within the soil. So it's going to grow healthier.
So if I was going to regrow leeks, that's what I would do. Okay. Chamomile
tea, flowerheads contains seeds. Um, you know, to be honest with you, I don't actually know if it's true
or not that the seeds are viable in a chamomile tea bag. Someone could
comment down below. Maybe they are. And that actually works. I'm not entirely
sure. Okay. So we've got a watermelon. And we're going to just
germinate the watermelon seeds. Transfer to soil. I mean, I don't see
anything wrong with that. That seems fine. Strawberries, slicing it thin
and placing it like that. I mean, that is one way that you could
do it. That's one way you could do it. Most people who, again,
some of these plants, it's not that you can't start them from
seed. It's just that you, as a grower, typically choose not to because
of the time and variety savings. So especially in the world of
strawberries, you have your June bearing, you have your everbearing, there's
a bunch of different types. You have your day-neutrals. And so if you want a specific type you
kind of just have to buy a bare root strawberry and/or buy something from
the nursery that's the variety you want. If you're doing it this way, you're just
going to get what you're going to get. And you might not know if it's a June
bearing or an everbearing or et cetera. And that actually does matter when it
comes to growing strawberries. Okay. If only strawberries grew that fast though
that would be amazing. Okay. Carrots, this is probably just gonna be a
carrot top hack, I think, right? Yeah. Okay. So yeah, this is actually true,
like that will work. That will happen. Here's the problem with
it. Almost everyone, when you buy carrots most of us don't
even buy carrots at the grocery store with the tops still on. But
on the off chance you do, or you go to the farmer's market,
most of us don't even eat them. Now that's kind of a shame because
carrot tops in fact are edible. And actually last year I had a really
good carrot top pesto that a friend made for me that was super delicious.
So you can eat carrot tops. The problem with this is you're not
going to get a new carrot taproot. So that's why most of us grow carrots. You're not going to get the thing that
you want. Okay. Yeah, this is, this, this actually works. So again, this is not as bad of a
Blossom video as most of them. The question about works versus should
you do it is the question really at hand, right? So I actually did this. I took a, a tomato from the store that had
started germinating from the inside. So with tomatoes, they have a sort of
mucilaginous gelatinous type
of coating around the seed, which is what protects them from
germinating inside a wet tomato. Typically you add water to a soil or
to a seed for it to germinate, right? But if it's existing in a wet environment,
how does it just not germinate? Well, the answer is that mucilaginous coating. What happens though is as
the tomato starts to rot, the acidity of the tomato starts
to eat away at that coating. And as soon as that coating has gone, water can penetrate into the
seed and start germinating. So what I saw is I saw that the tomato
started to germinate from within, and it looks really creepy if I'm
being honest with you. It looked gross. But I said, I'm probably not going
to eat this tomato at this point. Let me plant it in a pot of
soil and see what happens. So what ended up happening is probably
what they're about to show here, where I would say, well, they
just showed a complete tomato, but I would say dozens of
tomato seedlings started up. And so what I could do then is separate
them out and plant them in different areas of the garden. So that actually
works pretty well. Although again, it's less practical because you should
probably be eating the tomatoes you buy or grow instead of using them to grow
more tomatoes that you would then use to grow more tomatoes. It's kind of
this endless cycle. All right, let's look at this one here. Wilted flowers. Put the flower in there and
then chop it and it will regrow. Um, I mean, I have less experience
growing flowers than many other gardeners, so I would probably defer to them. But my intuition would tell me a cut
flower is probably not going to root that well and even if it did the point
of life that that plant is in is probably not in the best position to
just, well it certainly won't do that. But it just doesn't seem like the most
effective way to do that. Green onions. Okay. We're about to see
the classic gardening hack, something with green onions. Again,
almost all alliums can be done this way. Okay. So they've taken, they've created just like a little
green onion production center. Yeah this totally works. This is like the same as the leek tip
where what you'd rather do here is plant these in soil and continually cut them
instead of pull them out of the soil, chop them up and then put
it back into the soil. So if you're growing green onions,
this is just the way to do it. I mean, just cut them off, somewhat low,
let them keep growing, cut them off, let them keep growing, cut them off. And then every so often you'll probably
have to refresh the actual plant. But this completely works.
I think that was it. Blossom, baby. Gotta love
'em. So plant hacks, again, a lot of the times the hack is
just doing it the correct way, just doing it the way that makes the most
practical sense. And when I say that, I really mean, does it save
you, truly save you time? Does it truly save you money or is it
truly customized to your unique growing space? I mean, think of things like
taking a shoe rack that you don't use, filling that with soil, hanging it on a wall and planting
some herbs and leafy greens in there. That's I guess a hack, but
that makes sense. Because if, if all you have is one
little area of a wall, then maybe that's one of the most
effective ways to get a lot of things in a small space. And so that's
kind of like a hack, but it fits the rules of saving you time,
money and your unique growing space. So I would use those types of hacks. Some of these are like just too clever
for their own good and I wouldn't really prefer to use them. So if you have any other videos that
you'd like me to analyze like this, drop it in the Comments
below. But until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
