What happens when your favorite online plant hack website
actually does something right? Wait a minute! Kevin
Espiritu here from Epic Gardening. We're back with another Blossom reaction,
Blossom roast video. It's been a while since I've done one of these,
but they came out with a new one.
These 14 plant hacks will really grow on you.
And I have to say, I have a feeling they may have changed their ways.
So without further ado,
let's jump into this and see if these plant hacks are legit or
not. Cultivate that Like button because Blossom's video has 858,000 likes
and my whole channel probably doesn't have 858,000 likes.
So give me a little help here, Like the video. And let's jump into this roast.
We are starting out right away, right out of the gate, with a laundry hamper.
We've got a terracotta pot.
We have some soil and then some Spring Bloom detergent in the back.
I feel like there's a little product placement there.
Here's what we're going to do. They're dumping that in. It seems weird.
They've taken a mushroom. Looks like an oyster mushroom here. First of all,
let's just pause it right there. Let's just start off.
That's a big waste of oyster mushrooms. There's 1, 2, 3, 4. What, 16 of them?
That's like $15 of oyster mushrooms right there that I'm assuming they're going
to then use to grow more oyster mushrooms. There's an easier way to do this,
my friends, but let's talk about it. Recycled paper, water, and cellophane.
We're to put cellophane on the top because the sides are permeable.
But I kind of get it, they wanted to keep it somewhat moist.
The thing about this is, you can do this I believe.
I'm certainly not an oyster mushroom growing expert,
although I have grown a bunch in the past.
I either grow it with spore inoculant or from a pre-inoculated starter kit.
So I haven't done a whole lot of it myself,
but it does seem kind of inefficient to use the actual oyster mushrooms that you
would buy. There's a cheaper and easier way to do it. Nevertheless,
it's Blossom, so they have to make a show.
It does seem like their editing has gotten better. I have to say,
like that time lapse is pretty impressive.
I don't even know how they would edit that.
So maybe I need to hire Blossom's editor.
Easy harvesting. What you'll notice though, if we go backwards,
is that's actually not the same style of oyster mushroom. So they hacked.
They just hacked genetics there somehow. I don't know how they did that. Okay.
This next one, we have a pine cone. We put it in a toaster oven.
If contents ignite, keep door closed and unplug oven.
What are we going to do here? Heat it at 175 to dry it out, open it up.
Okay, I mean, I guess that would be speeding up the natural process there.
What happens with a lot of these seeds in the forests,
that can sometimes burn down,
is they do have a response to being lit on fire.
Charring the seed can kind of dry it out quicker or open up the seed hull,
speed up germination.
So they've basically done that here and then they've decided to sprinkle water
on it and start rooting it out this way.
I would imagine you probably wouldn't want to do it this way.
You might want to remove the seed and plant a single one,
and then you'd have way more.
Because this really isn't going to do much for you at all,
if it's even possible for it to germ that way and grow to the size that they're
showing it without really connecting to the root, or the soil, at all.
I'm not a pine grower but it doesn't seem like the best method to me.
Nevertheless, kind of cool. The thing with these ones,
guys is some of these past Blossom videos were like completely bogus,
completely wrong. These are in the category of like not even wrong,
where it technically can be done, but you may not want to do it.
So we've got moss. We have buttermilk and we've got a food processor here.
Weirdly enough, I have heard of this before when people were doing like
gorilla moss jungles and they'd plant them out in nature or on a wall somewhere.
And so what you're doing here is you're taking the moss and you're blending it
up into a bunch of little bits and you're mixing it with a somewhat viscous
substance that has at least some level of nutrition in it, with the buttermilk.
Also slightly acidic, which moss tends to prefer.
And then I'm assuming what they're going to do here is use it as like a slurry.
Yeah, okay, exactly. So you can use it as a slurry and paint it onto things.
And then the moss will adhere and start to grow.
So this is actually a legit method, like this does work.
I'm not sure if it would look exactly like that.
And then you could landscape it with even more moss and create a hanging moss
garden.
I've seen people traditionally do this in like an urban setting where they're
going out and painting it on a wall somewhere to kind of beautify a space.
But this works, this works. Okay,
here we have potting mix in a cabinet.
Weird positioning for that. But you do you, I guess.
So they say that's messy. Well, that's messy because it's in a kitchen cabinet.
So you just don't need to do that.
Here we have a disk.
So this is probably a disk of coconut coir,
which is a compressed shredded coconut husk cause it's been washed.
So this will expand quite a bit I bet. Yeah, this will go crazy.
These are actually a really good way to substitute out for peat moss in your
garden, if you don't want to use peat moss.
Coconut coir has roughly the same qualities. It's not exactly the same,
but it's kind of close and you don't have to use peat moss,
which can degrade the environment. You know, it can be used quite aggressively.
Here's, what're they going to do though? Let's see what they do.
They're going to then pot up a plant, a little pothos or English ivy there.
Easy potting. So they kind of made like a kokedama style.
It's like a Japanese potting technique where you just wrap the root ball in some
soil mix.
And then you kind of twine it up and you have this sort of floating little
potted plant type of situation. The difference here,
where they're saying the soil is messy and this is clean, that's true.
It's a lot cleaner to do that than scoop it out of your kitchen cabinet.
But this is a inert. There's no nutrition in coconut coir at all.
Whereas in that soil mix that you saw,
at the very least they added some organic matter or some slow-release compost or
fertilizer in that. So you'd have to fertilize it more if you did it this way.
But again, this is something that you can do. Okay, wilted plant.
They're just going to bottom water this it looks like. It's a good time lapse.
I've got to give Blossom some credit here. Roots take water as needed.
So this is actually how I water a lot of my houseplants.
I'll take a huge basin and I'll just fill it up with water.
And then I'll bottom water. As long as the pot has drainage holes, whoop,
water is going to be sucked up.
It's not really that the roots are taking water as needed. It's more that soil,
when it's not moist,
is going to hydrate upwards through wicking action or capillary action.
So it'll wet the bottom and then water actually will go against gravity,
travel upwards, and then the roots of course will use it as they need it. So,
this is great. This works perfectly fine.
We have to give Blossom some credit for this. So here we have a succulent.
What are we doing here? It changes colors in the sun. This is true.
I don't exactly know offhand what kind of succulent that is.
It kind of looks like some sort of aeonium,
but let's just take aloe for example. Aloe vera.
I did a video on aloe a while back. If you leave aloe in too much sunlight,
it will actually start to turn reddish pink and a lot of succulents have that
response. Okay, next up we have a sweet potato.
This looks like the classic experiment. So yeah, if you take a sweet potato,
as long as they, yep, there you go. That's what you see.
So here's the thing about sweet potatoes.
A lot of people think sweet potatoes are the same as potatoes and these little
sprouts you can just go ahead and plant straight in the ground.
You technically can. With potatoes,
it's a little bit better to let it what we call chit, or basically do this.
You don't typically put it in water.
You just kind of put it in a dark and cool place.
And you'll start to see the eyes sprout up.
Sweet potatoes are actually in a completely different family,
despite the common name being the same.
And so what you want to do here is typically you would grow what are called the
slips on sweet potatoes, which are the leafy green growth up top.
You would grow it this way. And then after this, let's see if they do it. Nope,
they don't. So what you WOULD do is you could snip off those slips,
just break them off at the bottom. Put those in water, root those,
and then plant those in the ground. That is typically how it's done.
When you're growing sweet potatoes and you buy slips from like an online nursery
for example, they're going to send you just the slip, not a honking potato.
And so that can be a great way to do it. So they're kind of halfway right here.
Wow. How did they just cut straight? How did they cut straight into that with,
how did they do that? Is that like a magic?
Hmm. Okay.
This is a weird one. Okay, Blossom cannot NOT do a green onion hack.
I feel like they have to do it. This works, guys.
It's just really awkward and weird to do it this way.
So they've taken a bunch of sort of Cippollini-style onions and then grown them
for green onions.
I feel like you would want to do this with actual green onions if you were going
to do it at all. And it's kind of odd to do it in like this sort of way.
I guess if you're like really space constrained, you could do it this way.
But this is just a green onion hack. I mean, technically again,
it's not even wrong. It works. Just kind of like a why situation.
Why would you do it? But, works though. Unlimited green onions. Okay,
We've got a tomato cutting. Are we just going to root a sucker in water? Yeah,
that's actually a pretty good shot, I gotta be honest.
That actually looked.
Those roots are kind of hot. Those are some hot roots. So tomatoes do this.
They have totipotency.
They have the potential to create roots along more or less anywhere you cut them
off. And so if you're pruning a tomato sucker, I've done videos on this before,
you can root them up. It works perfectly fine.
It's a great way to have a backup of a variety that you like.
So Blossom is a hundred percent on this one. This tip is completely legit. Okay,
chamomile. They always do a chamomile one too.
I'm assuming they have heated that teabag up.
I don't think that would make the seed viable at this point.
So what are they going to do? So they're going to sprout it.
And that's like a squash seed or something, or like a cucumber seed.
So that's not, this is a hundred percent wrong.
They went from so high to so low. They completely ruined this one.
That just doesn't work at all. It doesn't work at all. Okay, hydrogen peroxide,
soaking, bubbling. Let sit for a day. Okay. Then drain it.
Speeds up germination. I mean, I don't, this doesn't really do much at all.
The thing with hydrogen peroxide is that it can disinfect,
which can be nice because it's going to break down, so it's H2O2.
So it's going to break down into oxygen and water over time,
especially if you leave it out. So you can soak stuff in it to sterilize,
that can work.
I don't know how much truth there is to the speeding up of germination.
If it's going to work,
it's probably just the fact that you're soaking it and hydrating the actual
plant tissue. Okay, let's move on here. Oh, ooh,
they're coming at me with a luffa.
This better be a good tip because you know I love the luffa.
That might be my luffa, honestly. Okay, here we go. Cutting it in half,
and plant these seeds. Okay. Wait, is that it?
Is that all they did?
What?
That's not even a hack.
That's just plants have seeds in them and then you plant them.
That's not even a hack. So that's a thumbs down for me. Snake plant.
We're doing a propagation tip here. I think we are.
Soak them for six to eight weeks. That feels long.
I know you can prop snake plants in water.
I typically would not imagine you would bury them completely.
It seems like they'd be prone to rotting if you did that.
Also snake plants root completely fine like this if you plant them in soil.
So skip this step and just plant them directly in soil in my opinion. But again,
this is in the not even wrong category.
I probably wouldn't soak them for six to eight weeks completely submerged
though. I don't think that would work. What do we have here? What is this? Oh,
that's just the end of the video. Well,
honestly this was the best Blossom video I've ever roasted.
I couldn't roast that much of it. A couple were way off.
Most of them were kind of close and some of them were actually perfectly
correct. So what do you guys think? Let me know.
Drop links to other videos you want me to roast or review in the comments.
Cause I kinda want to make this a regular series here on the channel.
And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
And just in case you thought I was joking about the luffa, guys.
That's quite big, impressive.
I've got a ton this year. Best luffa year yet!