Any avid or amateur gardener knows that growing your own food and plants can be a daunting task, not to mention at times an expensive one. Nifty tricks can not only help save your wallet but help your growing greens to thrive.
An online gardening lover, The Hungry Gardener (@the_hungry_gardener), shares helpful at-home hacks with fellow gardeners, and this time, their advice involves reusing toilet paper rolls. In a handy TikTok video, the creator demonstrated how to repurpose the rolls for seedlings in an easy DIY hack. Follow suit with a number of used cardboard toilet paper rolls; in this case, the gardener uses six – and pair those with an old cardboard milk carton.
It’s as simple as this — begin by cutting a big rectangle into the old carton, which will be used as a vessel to hold the toilet rolls. In order for this to work, the hole you cut has to be able to fit all of the rolls inside of it.
Then, fill the now hollowed-out container with the toilet rolls, placing them all in two rows of three.
Once the rolls are tightly nestled in the container, it’s time to fill each roll with dirt and place the seeds inside.
An extra-handy tip is to create a watering hole to pour water into the base, helping the seeds to grow. To do this, cut an extra rectangle into the container, next to the one you’ve just filled with the rolls, and a lot smaller this time.
As long as you keep an eye on your contraption, it receives plenty of water, and it is sat in a sunny spot, you should have yourself some seedlings. These can then be transferred to your garden with the rest of your plants.
The Hungry Gardener keeps his own homemade plant pot on a windowsill indoors before then moving the newly formed plants into his garden.
Another gardening TikToker, known as gardening.with.ish, suggested repurposing toilet rolls in your garden to protect your plants and soil.
Ish explained: “If you’re trying to start to make your own compost, these work absolutely fantastic too. Simply just chuck the tubes in and pile that down with layers of organic material.
They went on to say that worms “absolutely love this stuff”. “Cut up one of these tubes, and lay it flat on the ground, and all of a sudden you’ve got yourself a really good weed membrane, and that, over the next few months, will slowly break down.”
Other gardeners have been using toilet rolls in the garden to help sow seeds for both sweet peas and broad beans.
Thrive shared their go-to tips for reusing the household item and even suggested some other alternatives. They said: “If you don’t have enough toilet roll tubes, you can also use the inside of a kitchen roll or roll of wrapping paper.”
For growing these vegetables, Thrive recommends placing two seeds in each tube, deep down into the compost around 4-5 cm deep.
Their site states: “The broad beans: Make a single hole in each compost tube. You could use a dibber to make holes, or a pencil, or your finger works fine. Place one broad bean seed into each hole.”