These 9 Household Items Make Great Garden Tools
I remember the moment I reached for the knife: I was trying to divide a bush of irises with rhizomes so thick that my spade refused to cut them. I thought, “A serrated knife will cut right through them” – and after a moment’s thought, I couldn’t think of a reason not to do just that. And just like that, a bread knife that had never seen any use in the kitchen became one of my most prized gardening tools.
The key to gardening efficiency is using the right tools for the job, and there’s no rule that says those tools have to come from the garden center. If you find an unconventional tool that can get the job done, don’t be afraid to take it out of the part of the house where it usually resides and move it into your garden.
Serrated knives
When the shovel can’t get through the roots and the hori-hori is too short, it’s time to get out the long bread knife. What I like most about using a bread knife is that I can stick it straight into the ground and use it as a saw for stubborn root balls, rhizomes, or roots. As long as you wipe the knife down after use, it shouldn’t rust and should remain a reliable tool in the yard.
PVC pipe
A traditional hole-cutter is a tool you use to make holes in the soil to place your seeds in. It turns out that a stick of PVC pipe does pretty much the same thing. And if you lose a piece of PVC in the yard, it won’t drive you crazy like it does when I lose my hole-cutter. In fact, PVC is more effective than a hole-cutter when it comes time to plant leeks, which you dig up and replant every few months so that most of the stem is bleached underground. When you replant them, you want a very narrow hole, about 10 inches deep — and PVC gets the job done.
But PVC can do more. It is the perfect material for creating hoops for a low tunnel over your beds, and thanks to all the connectors and fittings for PVC, you can even build a small greenhouse out of it.
Electric toothbrush
While you won’t find a better pollination method than good old bees, there are times when your plants need a little help. Sometimes you don’t have a lot of pollinators around, and sometimes you’re gardening indoors. In those cases, you need an electric toothbrush or, er, anything that vibrates. Once the plant is blooming and those flowers are opening, you hold the vibrating tool up to it and you’ll see the air fill with pollen like a yellow cloud. Some of that pollen will land on other flowers and pollinate them. I’ve found this method to be incredibly effective in my indoor gardens.
Copper pennies
Since the US Mint is about to retire pennies, here’s another way to use the ones you have. If they were made before 1982, they’re made of copper, and if there’s one thing slugs hate, it’s copper. It shocks the slugs, and they usually won’t move. Of course, you can buy copper tape — or you can just glue copper pennies around your raised beds. I like to use epoxy for this rather than hot glue, since the hot glue will just melt again in the heat.
Wire trash bins
Maybe you don’t have chickens that want to eat all your plants, and instead you’re dealing with just the average bird, raccoons, rats, and squirrels. Either way, wire mesh can make a great cage for your plants, keeping the animals out until the plant is big enough to stand on its own. The dollar store is a great place to find these gems, and when you do, buy a lot of them.
Five-gallon buckets and milk crates
Look, I’m convinced that five-gallon buckets—the cheap ones you can buy at Home Depot—are the unsung heroes of gardening. I always have eight to ten of them wandering around my yard. When I’m weeding, I look for the nearest bucket to toss them in. When I get into a tight spot where my wheelbarrow can’t get through, a bucket is great for scooping up and throwing. It’s easy to throw a bunch of buckets in the trunk of my car if I’m running to get sand or soil for the garden, or if I’m picking up a free plant from a neighbor who needs something to drive around with until I can plant it. Fill a bucket with water and soak whole plants in it, making them hydrophobic . You can use buckets to mix soil amendments. Buckets also make nice planters if you drill holes in them. I’ve seen driveway gardens full of tomatoes and peppers in five-gallon buckets.
In the same vein, milk crates are invaluable for garden storage because they don’t collect water. You can see everything they contain at a glance, and they fold up. Being able to fold things up in the garden is the equivalent of finding pockets in a dress: priceless. But the best use for milk crates is to use them for planting bulbs. Gardeners often use the crates that bulbs are shipped in (which look like milk crates) to plant this year’s bulbs, and once the crates are filled with soil and blooming, you won’t even notice the crate is there.
Cardboard
In my area, large cardboard rarely makes it to the recycling station. It is quickly taken for gardening because clean cardboard without tape or paint is the basis for sheet mulch . If you want to kill grass, compact weeds, and/or create paths in your garden, you start with a layer of cardboard. It will smother everything underneath, and as the cardboard decomposes, nitrogen is added to the soil. In the same vein, cardboard can be brown in your compost bin, which should be balanced with green (grass clippings, leaves, stems, etc.).
You can also use cardboard for germination. Some seeds, like carrots, are very difficult to germinate, they need constant moisture and don’t like the sun very much at this stage. A sheet of cardboard over the carrot seeds will keep the soil moist and provide darkness. Lift the cardboard after a week or two and check for germination. Once you see sprouts, remove the cardboard.
Scissors
I have every pair of pruning shears I can find (I always lose them), but there are some situations where nothing beats scissors. For delicate flowers like sweet peas, trying to wedge pruning shears between growing vines will do more harm than good. I constantly find myself needing to trim twine when I’m outside in the summer, and pruning shears rarely give a clean cut.