We're back again with another viral plant hack video.
This one was sent to me by you guys, I don't know how many times,
but it's not from Blossom. Surprise, surprise! It's from 5 Minute Crafts.
Now you guys have also said that there is a chef on YouTube that debunks a lot
of the 5 Minute Crafts' videos as well.
It's time for a gardener to hit them up with a little bit of knowledge.
So this one is called Simple Plant Growing Hacks for Your Gardener.
So I guess you can't watch this if YOU'RE a gardener,
you have to send this TO your gardener. And don't send me this,
I've gotten it many times. Okay,
simple plant growing hacks for your garden - try them and it will bloom.
66,000 reactions and 1,000 comments.
So not as popular of a video as Blossom,
but I'm sure there will still be plenty of interesting info in here to have a
conversation about and hopefully learn something from.
But before we get into the video, I'm feeling a little nostalgic, you know.
Blossom is really where I began in this sort of series.
So I feel like we should pay them an homage before we get into the video.
Hello Blossom my. Nope.
Goodbye Blossom my old. Nope. Because your. No,
come on. Goodbye,
Blossom my old friend.
Be back to roast you again.
Because your tips are sorely lacking,
any scientific backing.
And plant daddy's here to drop some knowledge in your brain.
Let's get insane, and don't forget.
To cultivate the Like button. Okay, let's get into the actual video.
Here we go. Let's get into the fun. We are starting out with a shovel,
pretty innocuous here, digging a hole, popping it up like that.
And what's going to go in here? Let's see.
They've just teleported in it looks like maybe some sort of pine tree branches.
Rosemary maybe, pine tree branches. Anyways,
it's going in and it's going to be, what? It's going to just morph.
Okay.
I think 5 Minute Crafts uses a lot more after effects and like special effects
in their videos than Blossom did.
So I guess what they're trying to say there is it'll magically go back down.
That's not really the best approach there. What you should probably do,
let's imagine it was like a small tree, is you want to take your shovel,
dig an actual hole and either you match the soil surface or you slightly go
above it by an inch or two, and then you put a bunch of mulch on top.
Maybe like two or three inches of nice mulch.
Don't get it next to the actual trunk of the plant.
And that would be the way to transplant your tree, in most cases.
There's obviously exceptions based on the type of tree.
Now we have a watermelon here. What are we doing with this watermelon?
We are sawing it with an angle grinder. Why? What? Okay,
so this guy is wearing, I think they're called Ov-gloves. I don't know why,
that's not gonna protect you from an angle grinder,
nor do you need it for a watermelon. So that's a weird hand attire choice.
But number two, you really don't need to cut that with an angle grinder.
And how did that happen? Okay. First of all,
don't use a power tool on a watermelon in almost all cases.
Really weird eye catching thing, gets your attention, but no practicality to it.
And I suspect we're going to turn this into a pot of some kind. Yeah.
Okay. Rubber plant, like the rubber plant,
have a video on the rubber plant on the channel that you guys can check out.
So now we've created a watermelon houseplant planter for our rubber plant.
I gotta be honest. That doesn't, to me,
doesn't actually even look good or aesthetic and you guys know what's going to
happen. It's just going to rot out.
It's going to rot out and that soil is going to fall everywhere. So that's a,
I mean, a mind bogglingly silly tip there. Alright.
So here we have what, a mango. Was that a mango? I wasn't paying attention.
I think it's a mango.
This is probably going to be a very similar tip to the one that we recently saw
on Blossom.
See they do like these cool kind of hacks here where it's like just a camera
trick. It's just boop and it's inside the Ziploc, just with some editing.
I will say, that's catchy. That is actually pretty catchy. It got my attention.
So we've sprouted the seed.
We're going to put it in a pot and eventually it's going to become what,
a tree? Yeah. What is that? That was mangoes, I think. Okay.
That's fine. I mean, you could do that. Again, it gets into the whole thing of,
if you know you want a specific variety of tree,
it's much better to buy it from a breeder than to, you know, try to do it.
It's just, it's just so much of your life.
So I personally would rather buy it from a breeder and just do it that way.
Let's talk about what's going on next.
It looks like we have some grape seeds here. Okay.
This is going to be another germination thing I think. So this,
this sort of towel germination method, it's a pretty common method.
Some of my friends use it more exclusively than they would use like a classic
seed starting setup. So I don't really have a problem with this.
I would just say sometimes I find it could be more work than it needs to be when
you can just start it in a nice seed starting mix.
And then you don't have to move it INTO a mix.
Because eventually this has to go into soil at some point. So in my opinion,
I will take a little bit slower germination rate perhaps,
and just have it start in the thing it's going to end up in. Right. All right.
So we've got our seeds, fancy little tool there to pick them up.
We are now putting them in a pot. I got to say,
so far this is a decent video.
Like it's not totally outrageous except for that watermelon tip.
It's not getting into Blossom level yet, in my opinion.
So now we've got some magically appearing grapes. Okay. We've got a pepper.
What is that, soy sauce? If it's soy sauce,
I'm kind of in because I'm a soy sauce addict. So this tip passes for me,
but what are they going to do with this? Um, yeah.
Why was that? So they do these weird things. Like why was that liquid dark?
I don't know what that liquid was,
but I think what they're going to do here again is another germination tip with
these tweezers. Is that just like dust, dust water, dirt water.
So we've laid down, so far we've laid down a plastic wrap, a towel,
the seeds, another towel and more plastic wrap. Again,
this method works, but you don't need plastic wrap, towel,
seeds, towel, plastic wrap. It's just a little bit too much you know,
it's just going a little bit overboard.
Now we're rolling it into a circle or cylinder, excuse me.
And we are now going to, okay. So they,
what they've done here is they've created a wicking system.
It's actually kind of clever because that means that they don't have to
continually mist the paper towel.
Whenever the top starts to dry out water wicks up from the bottom,
keeping the pepper seeds moist and allowing them to germinate.
So if you were to do it this way, that's kind of a clever solution for doing it.
Okay. So we have some seedlings coming up, uh,
not any pepper I've personally seen, but that's pretty standard.
A lot of the times these,
these websites or these channels will use a faster germinating seed if they
even use one at all.
If that's not just images that they're flash editing over.
Okay. So we've got it unrolled. It's coming out of the top. In my opinion,
those are a little bit of a leggy seedling.
What we call legginess in seedlings is when they stretch out trying to reach
towards the light.
You would plant a pepper seed typically no deeper than about a quarter of an
inch or so in the soil. So you're in a quarter inch.
And if you had a quarter inch,
imagine the seed surface right there coming up like that,
it'd be about there above the soil. That'd be a pretty stretched out seedling.
You kind of want your pepper seeds to have that first set of true leaves,
maybe like a half to an inch above the soil. So there's not a lot of stem.
Where there's a lot of stem like this it's really easy for it to blow over in
the wind. It's going to be a less hardy plant overall.
And this creates a lot of extra work compared to germinating pepper just
straight up in the soil as most people do.
Now I will say pepper is a plant that you do start from seed indoors more often
than you would like direct sow it. Beans, peas,
things like that you would direct sow outdoors. But still,
I wouldn't prefer that transplanting method right there. Alright.
We have a succulent tip here. Oh, this might be this,
okay this might be the same one as the Blossom one that we saw.
It looks like it is.
I actually got a lot of comments on the last Blossom reaction video we did where
people were saying this method works really well for them.
And they find it more fun to do or more effective than laying it out flat
and misting it all the time. If it works for you, you know,
I'm not here to say don't do things.
I'm just here to sort of share my experience. This certainly doesn't NOT work.
The question is, is it an efficient way to do it? And for some people,
it seems like that answer is yes. Because I will give this method some credit.
The credit I would give it is it does eliminate the need for you to continually
have to mist if you've planted your succulent cuttings right on the surface of
like succulent mix and you're just spraying everyday waiting for those little
roots to develop. Now, I might not bury them in the soil or, sorry,
in the water. I might not just submerge them in the water.
I might keep them right above and just allow that latent humidity,
that higher humidity in the air to get the job done. My personal preference.
Also,
you would still want to let the ends callus just a little bit before you started
this. But again, that's okay. Okay.
That's actually kind of a cool time lapse, if it is. I don't think it is,
but we will see. Okay. So now it looks like we have a beet here.
Yes we do. Is this going to be a regrowing hack? Yeah.
It's probably gonna be a regrowing hack. Okay, let's see what they do. Yup.
Regrowing hack. Yeah. You can tell,
like you can look and see where they're mis-editing it. Like they're,
they're clipping paths and stuff like that. They're definitely mis-editing it.
Okay. So beet greens actually are one of my favorite greens.
So if you wanted to regrow beets,
as compared to let's say regrowing carrot tops, it works as well.
But more people use beet greens than use carrot tops.
And that's what you're getting out of this.
You're not getting more beet or more actual carrot as far as the taproot.
So if I was going to pick to regrow one of the two,
I would at least regrow the beets. Okay.
So here we've got a, like a Rubbermaid tote tile style thing.
We've got some lettuce. Are we doing hydroponics here? Hey,
I don't mind this. Okay. So this is hydroponics.
It is a very simple version of hydroponics.
It's like a modified what we call deep water culture,
where the roots are sitting in a lot of water. But this one is a passive system,
meaning that you don't have aeration.
There's no air stone in there to kind of bubble it up and give the water more
oxygen. There's also no nutrients in here.
So if I was to fault this method here, I would say, I would add more nutrients.
Because what you don't want to have happen is you don't want this to grow with
water,
a limited amount of oxygen - cause there's not something aerated in any way -
sunlight and no nutrients.
So it's kind of missing two of the four things that plants need to survive.
You could fix this pretty quickly by perhaps submerging them a little bit less
deeply and adding some hydroponic nutrients into this mixture.
I actually don't think this is that bad given that you make those changes.
Alrighty, what do we have here?
It looks like some barley or some oat or some wheat type of seed here.
I think this, you know what?
Maybe Blossom and 5 Minute Crafts are in like a cabal together.
Maybe they kind of work together. I don't know.
I would love to meet the people who run these things, man.
I would love to meet them. Okay. So what have we done here?
We've soaked the seeds. We've left them. Yeah,
this is your standard sprouting jar.
I would say you could put way more seeds in that.
You don't need to have just like this tiny little baby amount of seeds.
You can put way, way, way more in.
It looks like we've gone with some toast with like salmon on it.
The toast looks a little weirdly pale, but besides that I would probably eat.
I would munch, I would munch. What do we? What do we have here?
So we've got an orchid.
We have rusty nails and we're going to put those in the soil for what reason?
Tell me why. Now we're going to barely water it at all. Okay. Effective.
And now it magically comes back to life. I mean, yeah,
iron deficiency I guess is what they're trying to say is happening there.
Let's see if there's a, like a text overlay. Nope.
They're just saying that makes it grow. Okay. Not a lot of context here, guys.
I don't think this is a great idea. And the reason why I'm not looking at,
what is that, butter? I don't even know.
I don't even want to know what the next one is. But to go back to the iron one,
just you can fertilize your plants in a normal way using normal organic,
granular fertilizer. And they're never going to have an iron deficiency.
And it's weird to put nails in there to try to like amalgamate that
action. Like what I find with 5 Minute Crafts and a lot of these videos,
and again I know they don't care about it being accurate,
but it's just the most weird and catchy way to do a simple task.
Right? So what is this butter? I'm actually mad about the butter right now.
I'm actually mad about the butter.
Uh, why though, but why?
Okay. So I guess what they're trying to do here,
I mean this is something that a lot of houseplant owners will do is you will
clean the leaves of your plant. If you think about it,
when dust lands on your plants, especially indoors, tons of dust indoors, right?
So when the dust lands on your plants, it is creating a light film,
which is refracting light,
and it's impeding the ability of that particular leaf to photosynthesize.
And so what a lot of people will do is they'll mist their plants,
they'll spray their plants and they'll take a nice little microfiber and they'll
wipe down their bigger leaves. You'd mist the plant,
you'd take some sort of cloth and you would just wipe it down. Now,
I think the reason why they've used butter here is to have
it forever be glossy, but that's not a good idea for a couple of reasons.
Number one,
it's a bad idea because that's an oil and fat that you're putting on top
of the plant.
That's not what it's used to having on top and plants transpire through their
leaves. You don't want to block what are called the stomata,
which are responsible for the respiration of the plant.
So the oils can clog that and then you're kind of damaging the plant's ability
to be a plant. So number one problem. Number two,
it's going to stay for quite a while. So that's, I guess,
that's their selling point. It's going to look glossy forever.
And then you have a dusty oily plant that you're still going to have to clean
off. So again, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but hey,
it's 5 Minute Crafts guys.
So I hope you enjoyed this version of a reaction video.
I know there were a couple of repeats in there,
but I figured I added a little bit of extra context around them and try to
explain and give credit where credit is due. You know,
not everything is bad in the world and I'm certainly not trying to destroy these
types of videos.
I'm trying to use videos that apparently millions of people see and give some
extra context on how to care for plants in what I consider to be a more
effective and practical and helpful way for you guys. So until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
Goodbye Blossom my old friend.
Be back to roast you again.
Because your tips are sorely lacking.
Any scientific backing,
and plant daddy's here to drop some knowledge in your brain.
Let's get insane. Because your tip, no, come on.