One of the easiest ways to connect with nature is to have a healthy garden.
The best gardens are a labor of love, but you can start small without pouring in a lot of time or money. Here are a few hacks to help out.
Turn weeds into fertilizer
When you pull weeds, don't throw them away. Instead, combine them with other green waste like garden trimmings in a bucket, then add a handful of healthy soil — ideally some with natural mycelium in it.
Then top the bucket off with water and seal it. In a couple of weeks, you'll have homemade fertilizer that returns the nutrients from the weeds to your garden soil.
Replenish drained soil
You can get a potting mix from any garden store, but after growing something in the pot for a while, it will run low on nutrients. Just remove the old plant (which you can recycle with tip No. 1), break up any dirt clumps, dig a hole in the middle of the pot, and add something organic.
That can be homemade fertilizer or compost, or even food waste like coffee grounds. Cover your fertilizer with more soil, add water to the pot, and you're ready to plant.
Keep pots off the ground
Plant pots are made with a hole in the bottom to allow extra water to drain out. If you set a pot on a flat surface, like pavement, it can create a seal around the rim of the pot so the water can't get out.
To prevent that, you need to keep your pots slightly raised off the ground. One experienced gardener recommends setting a few wine corks on the ground under your pots to help create that gap.
Salvage strawberry seeds
You can get your seeds or seedlings from a store, but isn't it better to get them for free? Next time you buy strawberries, cut them off and save the tops and any scraps.
Then, plant them under a couple of inches of soil. Put them in a sunny place and water them regularly, and before long, you'll be growing your own strawberries — no more trips to the store. You can plant many other seeds from fruits and veggies the same way.
Make seed bombs
In fact, once you get your garden going, you can gather seeds from many of your plants to grow next year's crop. Collect old toilet paper rolls, notch the ends, and fold over the sections to make a cup. Mix your seeds with peat-free compost.
Put the mixture inside the toilet roll containers, then notch and fold down the tops. Toss them anywhere in your yard that you'd like plants to grow.
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