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There is always some new little trick to try in the garden, some small clever thing that saves you a bit of time, or a bit of money, or gives your plants a better chance of thriving. And the old people were full of such tricks, for when you have little money and must make do with what is at hand, you learn a hundred small ways to garden smarter and waste nothing.
I have gardened this Lancaster County ground my whole life, the way my father and his father did, and most of what I am about to show you I learned from them, for the old people gardened by their wits and their thrift more than by anything bought from a store. My grandfather had a saying he lived by, use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Near every one of these tricks is made from a thing you would have thrown away, and not a one of them asks you to spend a dime.
Here is what I walk you through in this one:
✓ Turning a long-handled tool into a measuring stick so you never hunt for the tape again
✓ Making and renewing your own plant labels from scrap containers, broken tile, and smooth creek stones
✓ Covering a fr
There is always some new little trick to try in the garden, some small clever thing that saves you a bit of time, or a bit of money, or gives your plants a better chance of thriving. And the old people were full of such tricks, for when you have little money and must make do with what is at hand, you learn a hundred small ways to garden smarter and waste nothing.
I have gardened this Lancaster County ground my whole life, the way my father and his father did, and most of what I am about to show you I learned from them, for the old people gardened by their wits and their thrift more than by anything bought from a store. My grandfather had a saying he lived by, use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Near every one of these tricks is made from a thing you would have thrown away, and not a one of them asks you to spend a dime.
Here is what I walk you through in this one:
✓ Turning a long-handled tool into a measuring stick so you never hunt for the tape again
✓ Making and renewing your own plant labels from scrap containers, broken tile, and smooth creek stones
✓ Covering a fr
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is always some new little trick to try in the garden, some small clever thing that
00:05saves you a bit of time, or a bit of money, or gives your plants a better chance of thriving.
00:10And the old people were full of such tricks, for when you have little money and must make
00:16do with what is at hand, you learn a hundred small ways to garden smarter and waste nothing.
00:23So today I have gathered ten of the best of these simple garden tricks for you,
00:27plain clever things that make for a better harvest with less work and less money spent,
00:33near every one of them done with something you already have about the place.
00:38I am Elias, and I have gardened this Lancaster County ground my whole life,
00:43the way my father and his father did, and most of what I am about to show you I learned
00:48from them,
00:49for the old people gardened by their widths and their thrift more than by anything bought from a store.
00:55None of these ask you to spend a dime. They ask only that you look at the things around you
01:02a
01:02little cleverer and see the use in what others throw away. Let me give you the ten. Let me tell
01:09you where this whole way of thinking comes from, for it is the heart of it. My grandfather had a
01:15saying he lived by, use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Nothing left his hands
01:22as waste,
01:23if there was any use left in it. A worn out tool became a new tool for another job. A
01:30broken thing
01:30was mended or made into something else. The tin can, the glass jar, the bit of wire, the scrap of
01:38board,
01:39every one was kept and found a second life. It was not stinginess mind, it was respect, a sense that
01:46a
01:46thing made or grown was not to be thrown away while it still had use in it. And it bred
01:52a wonderful
01:53cleverness, for a man who will not buy a new thing must look hard at the old things and find
01:58the use
01:59hidden in them. Every one of these ten tricks comes out of that habit of mind, of looking at a
02:05cast-off
02:05bottle or a creek stone or a cardboard tube and seeing not rubbish but a tool waiting to be used.
02:13Learn that way of seeing and you will invent a hundred tricks of your own beyond these ten.
02:19The first is a simple thing that saves you fetching a tape measure a hundred times a season. Take one
02:26of
02:26your long-handled tools, a rake or a hoe or a spade, and lay it on the ground beside a
02:32tape measure,
02:33and with a permanent marker make measurement marks right along the handle, a mark at every foot or
02:40every few inches. Now whenever you need to space your plants a certain distance apart, you have a
02:46measuring stick already in your hand, no need to go hunting for the tape. A small thing, but you will
02:52bless it a hundred times come planting season. And you can go further with it, for a long board or
02:58a stick
02:59will do the same and better, a planting board with notches or marks cut right into it at the spacings
03:05you use most, six inches, a foot, and so on, so you can lay it down a row and pop
03:11a seed in at each mark,
03:13quick and even and true. The old gardeners had such a measuring stick worn smooth with years of use,
03:20and their rows came up straight and evenly spaced as if drawn with a rule, for they were.
03:27The second is about plant labels for marking your rows, and it is two tricks in one. First, if you
03:34have old plastic labels gone useless because you cannot read the faded marker on them, do not throw
03:40them out, just rub them with a bit of sandpaper, and the old marker rubs right off and the label
03:47is
03:47fresh and new again, good for several more years. And second, if you would make your own labels free,
03:54there are a dozen ways. An old, clean container can be cut into strips, several labels from the one
04:01pot. A broken roof tile, marked with white paint, makes a handsome marker. But my own favorite, and the
04:08prettiest, is to take smooth, flat stones, the kind you find by any creek, and write the plant name on
04:15them with paint or marker, and lay them at the foot of each row. They look natural and lovely, they
04:22never
04:22blow away, nor rot, and you gather them up and use them again year after year, nothing bought, and better
04:29than
04:29the store labels besides. And a stone label has a charm a plastic stake never will, for it looks as
04:37though it
04:37belongs there, half hidden at the foot of the row, and a child can be set to painting them of
04:43a rainy afternoon,
04:44which makes a pleasant task of it. Whatever you use for a label, do write plain and clear,
04:51for come the busy spring you will not remember what you sowed in each row, however sure you are now
04:57that
04:58you will. The third is for when a late frost catches you by surprise, an unexpected cold snap forecast for
05:06the night, and your tender seedlings out in it with no protection. If you have not got proper cloches,
05:13those little glass or plastic covers, here is the old answer. Take a clay flower pot, an ordinary
05:20terracotta pot, turn it upside down, and set it right over your precious seedling, like a little warm jacket
05:28for the night. The clay holds off the worst of a light frost and keeps the plant snug. Just do
05:35not forget to
05:36lift it off come morning, for the plant must have its light to grow, and a pot left on all
05:42day will
05:43starve it of sun. And it is the clay especially that does the work, for terracotta holds a little of
05:50the
05:50day's warmth and gives it back slow through the night, where a thin plastic pot would not. For a bigger
05:58plant or a short row, an upturned bucket or box does the same, or a sheet thrown over stakes, anything
06:06to
06:06trap the ground's warmth and hold off the frost's killing touch for the one cold night. It is a light
06:14frost this guards against, mind, not a deep hard freeze, but a light surprise frost is just the kind
06:22that catches a gardener out and kills a flat of tender seedlings he forgot to cover.
06:28Quick word before I go further. The old methods my family uses, there is more of it than fits in
06:35any
06:36one video. I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com. The book is the long version.
06:44If you
06:45want it, it is there. I will not mention it again. The fourth is for the aphids, those little soft
06:52green
06:53pests that come in their multitudes and infest your plants, clustering thick on the tender new growth
06:59and the undersides of leaves. Many folks squish them with their fingers, a messy, nasty job, or blast them
07:08off with a hard jet of water, which takes time and wastes water. Here is a cleaner, cleverer way.
07:16Wrap a wide strip of sticky tape around your hand, sticky side facing out, and then just pat the infested
07:24leaves with your taped hand, and the aphids stick right to the tape and lift away. Mind you get the
07:31undersides of the leaves especially, for that is where they love to hide. When your tape is full of
07:37them, wrap on a fresh strip and carry on. Clean, quick, and it costs you a bit of tape.
07:44The fifth is for keeping thirsty plants watered in a hot dry spell, the cucumbers and tomatoes and such
07:52that suffer and give a poor crop if they dry out. You make a little water reservoir from an old
07:59plastic
07:59bottle, and it waters the plant slow and deep right at the roots. Take the bottle, drill or poke a
08:07few small holes in the cap, and cut the bottom off the bottle. Then sink it upside down into the
08:14soil,
08:14right beside the plant, cap end down, before or just after planting, leaving about an inch of it
08:21poking above the ground. Now you fill that bottle with water, and it seeps out slow through the holes in
08:28the cap, down deep at the roots where it is wanted, over hours, instead of running off the surface.
08:35Keep it filled in the hot weather, and your plant drinks steady and deep, and never wants. It is the
08:42same wisdom as a slow soaking does more good than a fast flood, only made from a bottle you would
08:49have
08:49thrown away. And the deep watering does a second good beyond just keeping the plant wet, for by carrying the
08:56water down deep, it draws the roots down deep after it, and a deep rooted plant stands the heat and
09:03drought
09:03far better than a shallow one. So the buried bottle not only waters your thirsty plant, it trains it to
09:11root
09:11deep and strong. One bottle to a thirsty plant, kept filled in the hot weather, and you need not stand
09:18over it with a hose
09:19every evening. The sixth saves water and your water bill both by reusing the water from your own kitchen.
09:27When you boil vegetables for supper, do not pour that water down the drain, for it is full of a
09:34little
09:34goodness cooked out of the vegetables. Let it cool, and then pour it on your garden or your pots. The
09:42plants
09:42are glad of it. Now a word of honest caution on kitchen water. The clean water off boiled vegetables
09:50is fine and good. Dish water you may use too, but only if your soap is a gentle plant-based
09:58kind, and never
09:59the water you have washed greasy, meaty, or dairy things in, for you do not want all that grease and
10:07fat
10:07soaking into your garden soil. So the veggie water freely, the gentle dish water with care,
10:15and the greasy water never. The water you have boiled eggs in is good too, carrying a little of
10:22the lime from the shells that the garden likes, and the water you have steamed or boiled most any plain
10:29vegetable in. It is a small saving each time, but it adds up over a dry summer, and it galls
10:37the
10:37thrifty soul to pour good water down the drain, and then turn around and pour bought water from the
10:44tap onto the garden, when the one might have served for the other. The seventh is for seeds with a
10:51hard
10:52coat, like peas and sweet peas, that have a tough shell that takes a good while to soften and break
10:59down
10:59in the soil before the seed can sprout, so they are slow to come up. You can give them a
11:06head start
11:07with a simple soak. The night before you plant them, put the seeds in a bowl of lukewarm water
11:14and let them soak overnight. That softens the hard coat through, and when you plant them the next day,
11:21they sprout far quicker, having got a jump on that slow softening. A bowl of water and a night's wait,
11:29and your peas are up days sooner. Beans take to it as well, and beets, and many a big hard
11:38seed.
11:39Two cautions mind, do not soak the tiny fine seeds, they need it not, and it only makes them a
11:47sticky
11:47mess to handle. And do not soak over long, a night is plenty, for left in the water a day
11:55or two,
11:56the seed may drown and sour rather than sprout. A single night in lukewarm water, then plant,
12:04that is the whole of it. The eighth is a clever one for the plants that hate to have their
12:10roots
12:10disturbed, the beans and peas especially, which is why folks are told to sow them right where they are
12:17to grow rather than start them and transplant. But sowing straight in the ground has its troubles too.
12:25The seed may rot in cold, wet spring soil, or a seedling get eaten, leaving gaps in your row.
12:34Here is the old trick that gets around it. You make little pots from cardboard tubes, the tube from the
12:41center of a roll of paper. Take a tube, make a few cuts up one end, and fold those flaps
12:49in to make a bottom.
12:51Fill it with soil, and sow your seed in it. Start them so, indoors or in a sheltered spot,
12:58and when the time comes to plant out, you plant the whole thing, tube and all, right into the ground.
13:06The cardboard rots away in the soil, and the roots grow right out through it, and the plant
13:13never has its roots disturbed at all, for you never took it from its pot. The pot itself went into
13:20the
13:20ground and vanished. No rot, no gaps, no disturbed roots. This is one of the finest of all these tricks,
13:29for those root-shy plants are just the ones folks lose the most of, and this solves it clean. And
13:37it
13:38costs you nothing at all but the tubes you would have burned or binned anyhow. Save them up through
13:45the winter, and you will have a fine stack come spring. Some folks make the same sort of pot from
13:52a
13:52square of newspaper folded round a jar to shape it, and that works as well, paper being just as
13:59ready to rot away in the soil and let the roots through. The ninth is for those with little garden
14:06room, and the answer is to grow upward instead of outward, to go vertical. Many vegetables will climb
14:14or trail if you give them something to climb, so up a wall or fence or trellis they go, taking
14:20no ground
14:21room at all. And you can make vertical planters too. An old length of rain gutter, the kind that runs
14:27along a roof edge, cut to length, with a few small holes drilled along the bottom to let water drain,
14:34and fixed to a wall or fence with brackets, makes a fine, long, shallow planter. Fill it with a good
14:41moisture-holding soil and grow strawberries or salad greens in it, things that do not mind shallow soil,
14:47and keep it watered. A whole garden of greens up a bare wall, where nothing grew before. For a small
14:54yard or even a porch, going vertical can double what you grow. And there is more than space saved by
15:01it,
15:01for a plant grown up in the air, off the ground, gets better sun all round and better moving air
15:07through it, which keeps the molds and blights at bay, and its fruit hangs clean and easy to pick,
15:13rather than lying in the dirt to rot or be eaten. The old people grew their pole beans and their
15:19climbing peas up tall poles and trellises for just these reasons, getting a great crop off a small
15:25patch of ground. Look up, and you will find a whole second garden in the empty air above your beds,
15:32and along your bare walls and fences. The tenth and last is the one that ties all the rest together,
15:39and it is simply to plan your garden, on paper, before you plant. Now, I have no use for the
15:45computer programs they sell for this, but a pencil and a sheet of paper does the very same work,
15:51and it is the old way besides. You draw out your garden beds, and you plan what goes where,
15:57and good planning saves you more grief than any other single thing. It keeps you from sowing at the
16:03wrong time, from spacing your plants too close or too far, and most important, it lets you rotate your
16:09crops, never growing the same thing in the same spot two years running, which is the old wisdom for
16:15keeping the soil borne pests and diseases from building up. A plan also lets you see ahead to where
16:21a row will finish and leave a gap, so you can have another crop ready to slip into that gap,
16:26and keep every foot of ground working all season. A garden planned on paper in the quiet of winter
16:32is a garden that runs smooth all summer. And keep your old plans year to year, do not throw them
16:39out,
16:39for that record of what grew where is exactly what tells you where not to plant a thing this year,
16:44so your tomatoes follow your beans and not last year's tomatoes, and the soil never wears out,
16:50nor breeds the same trouble twice. A few sheets of paper kept in a drawer become, over the years,
16:57a record of your whole garden's life, worth more than any book you could buy on the subject,
17:02for it is the record of your own ground and no one else's. The old people kept just such garden
17:08journals and read them like scripture come planting time. Now let me say the small honest word about the
17:14spirit behind all ten of these, not to rile you up just so you see the shape of it. Look
17:20back over them
17:21and you will notice that near every one is made from a thing you would have thrown away, an old
17:26bottle,
17:26a cardboard tube, a length of cast off gutter, a creek stone, the water off your supper vegetables.
17:34There is a whole trade now selling you a special gadget for every one of these jobs,
17:38the fancy plant labels, the watering spikes, the seedling pots, the cloches, each sold dear.
17:46And every one of them you can make for nothing from what is already about your place.
17:50I am not telling you a man schemed this. No one had to. It is worse than a conspiracy,
17:57because it is a system nobody had to coordinate. It simply pays better to sell a gardener a gadget for
18:03every little task than to remind him that a bottle and a stone and a cardboard tube and his own
18:09wits
18:10do the same for free. The old people had no gadgets to buy and no money to buy them with,
18:16so they made
18:17everything from what they had and their gardens did not suffer for it one bit. So there are your ten.
18:23Mark your tool handle for a measuring stick. Make and renew your own labels from scrap and stones.
18:30Cover a frost-caught seedling with an upturned clay pot. Lift aphids off with sticky tape.
18:36Sink a holed bottle for a slow water reservoir. Save and reuse your clean kitchen water.
18:44Soak hard seeds overnight for a quick start. Make rot-away pots from cardboard tubes for the peas and beans.
18:52Grow upward to make the most of small space. And plan your whole garden on paper before you plant.
18:59Ten small, clever things, near none of them costing a cent, every one making your garden a little better
19:06and your work a little less. Now I want to hear from you, and I ask honest, because I learned
19:13the
19:13whole country from these comments. Tell me in the comments below what is your own best garden trick,
19:20the clever little thrifty thing you do that others might not know, for I gather these like some men gather
19:26stamps, and I would dearly love to hear yours. And tell me your county and what you grow, because the
19:33tricks that serve in one climate differ from those in another, and I like to map it by where you
19:39all
19:39write from. I read every one. Next time, I have gathered up another ten of these thrifty garden
19:46tricks for you, a second helping, more of the small, clever, cost-nothing ways the old people
19:53garden smarter, for there are far more than ten of them, and I could not fit them all in one
19:58telling.
19:59If you found these useful, the next batch you will not want to miss. The old people gardened by their
20:05wits and their thrift, making every tool and every drop of water and every cast-off thing
20:11do double duty, wasting nothing and buying little, and their gardens fed their families well for all
20:19that they spent next to nothing on them. There is a deep cleverness in that kind of thrift that our
20:25gadget-buying age has all but forgotten. The garden grown by wit and thrift, rather than by the gadget
20:32catalog, is the garden that remembers how the old people really gardened. The people who built this
20:38country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.
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