Hey plant lovers! Taking care of plants doesn’t have to be complicated. With a few simple gardening techniques, you can help your plants grow big, strong, and healthy—just like a professional gardener would!
Whether you have indoor plants that brighten up your home or a beautiful outdoor garden, these easy-to-follow tips will keep your plants happy and thriving.
today i’m going to share tips on how you can care for your plants like a professional does and these tips are going to be applicable for both indoor and outdoor plants
Loosen the Top Soil Regularly for Healthier Roots
This will allow aeration for roots and improve water absorption so take anything sharp or trouble or even an old knife and loosen the top inch or two of soil
While doing this if you think that you have hit any of the roots
It’s all right if they’re tiny roots that have been uprooted there’s nothing to worry about
but if you’re a beginner and if it just so happens that you’ve hit the main route or if you’ve disturbed it anyway
Let the plant heal for a couple of days repeat this every month and you can do it for almost all plants vegetables flowers and even indoor plants
Trim Your Plants Regularly for Faster Growth
The trimming technique might vary depending on the kind of the plant
If you have plants such as money plant or any of the pothos or monsteras or basically any plant that trails cut the ends this will make the plant invest in side growth
This will stop the plant investing in vertical growth and instead inducing site growth basically making your plant more bushier and improving the rate of growth
For plants such as fiddly figs rubber plant plants that grow vertically with a solid stem and broad leaves snip them from here this will initiate side growth and especially if you have plants that haven’t shown any new growth recently then this tip will be super helpful for you
The Right Way to Trim Your Vegetables
Spinach or any leafy vegetable does not need any kind of trimming but for edibles like tomatoes and cucumbers
It will be really helpful. So this is a cucumber plant here and to get cucumbers with the fruit quickly on it
we need to ensure that it grows vertically as much possible and we need to stop any kind of side growth so for that what we will do is wherever you see such side stems growing out of the main stem just nip them.
plants such as erica aglonema or other such plants which do not have any main stem try and remove all the yellow or mature leaves
If there are couple of leaves that look brown or yellow and rest all of them look healthy there’s nothing to be worried about just clip them out
Regular removal of any matured or yellow leaves or any of the brown leaves will help your plant to invest energy only in the healthy stems
Now, for example in erica there’s no main stem so in this plant you can give it something like a good haircut so remove all the old leaves even if they are not yellow or brown so that the plant can invest energy into bringing out new stems
Now, with all the dried leaves that you collect every month when you do that you can put them in your compost bin
Adding compost or fertilizer
For your plants in my couple of other blogs i’ve shown you that very simply very easily you can produce your own card or compost from your kitchen waste add a little of curd and some soy and you will have good compost homemade compost within a month or so
for this you can use a kamba which is a proper compost bin or even a matka with a couple of aeration holes and if you don’t have either of them you can start with a simple bucket but the deeper the bucket is the better
It will be a good frequency to add that fertilizer is for garden if you are growing plants outdoor in a garden then you can add a fertilizer in two months once in two months it’s okay
But if you’re growing them in pots the frequency has to be more so once in 20 to 30 days and the reason for that is that when you’re growing a plant in pot there’s limited amount of nutrients in it and whenever you add water to it those nutrients are leached out then lost along with water
so you need to regularly add those nutrients in some form
I have a pro tip for anyone who has started gardening recently you should be mindful of when and how you’re watering your plants now when i say when i mean first what time of the day
It’s better to water your plants early in the morning because if you’re watering your plants in the evening for the entire night they’re going to be standing in water or they would be standing in wet soil because the loss the moisture loss the evaporation would be lesser in the evening or in the night
during the day as the sun comes out the heat the ambient temperature increases both indoors and outdoors as a result the stress on the plant due to the loss of moisture also increases
so it’s better if you provide water to your plants in the morning however if you have just a plant or two you don’t need to worry about it so much whenever you get a chance what are your plants
And this factor of when to water day or night does not affect your plant so much as the over watering or underwatering does
Right Watering Techniques to Avoid Overwatering
A good test to know when to water your plant is that you touch the soil and see if it sticks to your finger for most of the plants both indoors and outdoors
if it sticks to your finger then do not add water that means there’s enough moisture for the roots now of course this also varies depending on the kind of the plant what i told you just now is like a general rule of thumb that you can apply for most of the plants but if you have many many plants i would say first look at your plant and judge what kind it is
for example most of the broad leaf plants such as the rubber plant, phylodendrons, monsteras,aglonema, fiddly fig, they lose water very quickly
because if you look at the leaves the leaves are broad surfaced right and the rate of evaporation because of the high surface area would be much more in these plants so for such plants touching the soil with your finger and seeing if it sticks to your finger or not and then adding the water works really well
but there are also plants such as succulents any kind of supplements your aloe vera or these pretty ones like echeveria or sedums if you break their leaf you would see that they store water in them
And these plants are the ones that have evolved in conditions where the moisture in soil is really really low now if you keep adding water to these plants they’ll definitely die on you so for them
it’s better to keep them under watered meaning that even if the soil has completely dried out completely top to bottom it’s all right that will not kill that plant as much the over watering can
How to water your plants
it’s always good to invest in a watering container or a can like this but if you don’t have access to it use a bottle with a couple of holes on its cap or just keep your hand under like this while watering with the mug
It will help reduce the pressure of falling water on the delicate parts of the plant
I hope all these tips that i shared with you today help, Happy gardening.