Gardening: Tips and tricks to make gardening easier this spring

Winter is a perfect season to re-evaluate how you do your gardening. None of us wants to waste time or energy when spring arrives. Here are some simple hacks that can make gardening easier.

Seed tapes are a great way to plant vegetables and flowers, especially small seeds like carrots. The seeds are properly spaced on the tape so all you need to do is roll it out in the garden and cover them. However, seed tapes are expensive and often come in limited variety choices. So, make your own. Start with the seed you want, a roll of toilet paper and a little flour and water glue. Roll out a length of TP to fit your garden space. You can fold it and cut it in half to make a narrower tape. Combine a half cup of flour, a pinch of salt and a third of a cup of water into a paste. Paint the paste onto the center of the tape. Place the seeds on the glue at the recommended spacing and let everything dry for several hours. Roll up the tape and label it and they will be ready for planting in the spring.

Got an ant problem in your garden? Buy the cheapest bottle of cinnamon at the discount store and shake it liberally onto the ants’ runways. They hate it and abandon the site in short order. This is an old beekeeper’s trick I used on my hives. They freaked out and ran, taking their larvae and eggs with them.

Have trouble with soil leaking out of the bottom of small pots? Before you plant, place a coffee filter in the bottom of the pot and fill it with your favorite soil mix. The coffee filter over the drain hole will allow excess water to easily escape but hold the bits of dirt in place. In the fall, the filter and the soil can be easily composted.

Hilling up potatoes as they grow can be a lot of work. Instead, mound a ridge of soil about 10 inches tall where you want to plant your potatoes. Moisten the soil with a soaker hose to get the water down deep. Cut your potato chunks and then insert them at the appropriate spacing about 6 inches deep into the bottom third of both sides of the mound. The potatoes will emerge within a couple of weeks, and the mound will provide enough space for tubers to develop. Last summer, using this method on a 20-foot row yielded nearly 200 pounds of potatoes.

If grass invades your perennial plantings, an easy way to get rid of it without digging up the bed is to wipe the grass with an herbicide on a cotton glove. Mix a small amount of your preferred weed herbicide and put on rubber or surgical gloves. Place a cotton glove over the base glove and dip it in the herbicide mix. Squeeze it out so it won’t drip and gently wipe the grass blades.