garden centers are full of helpful garden gadgetry that can really make a difference in your wallet. However, with a little ingenuity, you can craft these things for free with things you have laying around the house. I'm Brian with Next Level Gardening. Welcome. In this video, I'm going to show you 10 of my favorite free garden hacks. Let's get right into it with the inside of paper towel or toilet paper rolls. One popular way of doing it is cutting four slits and folding in the bottom so that you have a solid bottom. But you don't really need to do that. Just grab a container that has drainage holes in the bottom and stack the toilet paper tubes side by side. Add your seed starting mix. The seed starting mix that falls around the outside of the tubes will hold them in place. This method is especially good for peas, beans, any legume, even sweet pea flowers because they like long deep root systems. Once the plants are ready to transplant, you can stick the entire toilet paper tube in the ground.

bury it. It will disintegrate in no time, and there will be no transplant shock. Slugs can be huge problems in the garden, especially with your spring lettuce. If you have some old plywood laying around, wet the ground with a hose, and then lay the piece of wood right there on the ground overnight. Slugs will gather underneath. You can go ahead and dispose of them in any way you see fit. Off to a good start. Let me know in the comments what your favorite free garden hack is, either one you learned from someone else or came up with on your own. Plastic is everywhere nowadays, literally everywhere. You can reuse some of your plastic bottles in many different ways. You can make a small greenhouse for individual plants with a 2 L bottle. Just cut the bottom off and sit it over your plant. You can go ahead and put a bamboo stake down through it, and that will keep the bottle from blowing away. For plants that need deep watering like tomatoes, you can make your own personal drip system. Poke a bunch of

holes in the cap that will let the water flow out slowly. Cut the bottom off of the bottle and bury it next to your tomato. Fill it up with water, and as the water seeps out the bottom, it's going to water those deep water roots that tomatoes have. You can also put the bottom of the bottle back on to make sure that no dirt gets in there and clogs those holes. Plant tags are expensive, and let's face it, we lose most of them before the season's over. Take any semi-hard plastic container like yogurt or sour cream and cut them into plant tags. You can also use old window blinds, just cut them or break them to the desired size, and these can be used over and over for years. I used to have a set of metal ones that I made hundreds of markers out of that lasted a really, really long time. Sometimes it's hard to sow really small seeds like lettuce or carrots without having to thin out a bunch later. Take an Old Spice bottle with a shaker top, put a

couple tablespoons of sand into it, along with the seeds from one seed packet, and Shake It Up. When you sprinkle the contents out, it will naturally space the seeds Out Among the sand. Have you ever counted the number of seeds in any legume package like beans or peas? There's not all that many. Have you ever counted a bag of dried beans? There's a lot more. You take out 20, which might be in a seed packet, you're not really going to miss that 20, but you basically have a free 20 seeds to plant or use the whole bag. Who am I to hold you back? While we're continuing the subject of peas, twigs and small branches from any shrub at this time of year that you might be cutting back are great to help peas start to climb. Dwarf peas can actually live their entire life on some branches just like this, no trellis needed. Anybody have an old stinky sponge, place it in the bottom of a pot to cover the drainage hole, then fill with potting soil. As you water the pot.

the sponge soaks up the water and distributes it slowly as the soil in the pot dries out. Is it just me, or do seeds germinate much better in the path than in actual beds? Rather than weeding it out and tossing it away, anything that's sown, just go ahead and dig it up out of the path and transfer it into a bed. When you're taking cuttings from plants for propagation, you might be tempted to use rooting hormone, which isn't cheap. And honestly, I don't feel that it's needed for most things. What's more important is keeping fungus off of your cuttings so they don't get disease and rot away before they have time to root. That's where honey and cinnamon come in. Both have anti-fungal properties. Dip the ends of your cuttings in either one of these before you put them in the pot and watch your success rate skyrocket. I hope you got something out of these top 10 free Garden hacks. I would venture to bet you probably have the things laying around the house for

out of 10. Maybe even 10 out of 10. If you want to know how to get free plants from the garden center, take a look at this video right here. I'll see you next time.

Top 10 Free Vegetable Gardening Hacks

Top 10 Free Vegetable Gardening Hacks