We are back again with the best gardening content of all time. Blossom.
Now this one is called,
this is called "13 Genius Gardening Hacks That You'll Be Glad To Know".
261 million views,
seven times my entire YouTube channel and 2.3 million reactions.
Now let us just quickly take a little peek at what's going on inside.
I feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome because honestly,
I weirdly like look forward to these videos now almost in a perverse way of
like, what are they actually going to get right versus wrong.
So hello Blossom.
Hello Blossom my old friend,
I've come to roast you again. All right,
here we go. We're starting it off with a mango seed.
Alright, so far so good. They can take it out. Okay,
so they're going to germinate the seed with water, standard procedure.
This Ziploc bag thing is pretty standard, sprouts in five days.
This is another one of those situations, like some of the other Blossom videos,
where you can grow a tree from seed, for sure.
And mango actually is a relatively fast growing tree compared to other types of
fruit trees. But again, are you going to get the variety that you want?
Are you going to get it in the speed you want?
Remember like trees take up a significant portion of a human life to grow.
And so you might as well get a variety that is reputable,
performs well and is grown by a nursery that you trust.
But for a fun experiment, there's really nothing wrong with this.
So I cannot trash Blossom straight out of the gate,
though I suspect that will change pretty soon. And it might change right now.
There we go. Okay, so they're putting flower seeds inside of a sponge.
I'm assuming for some germination.
The upside down bowl I'm guessing is just to provide a little pressure so it
doesn't dry out. Uh, yeah, I mean,
they definitely will moisten the seeds that way and it will germinate.
Again, the roots are going to start digging into the sponge.
You're going to have to plant a sponge that's made out of manmade materials.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to do it this way.
The emotion that is on the screen right now is how I feel about it.
But watch what blossom feels about it. Oh yeah, I don't think so.
I'm not giving that a smiley face. Okay,
we've got some succulent propagations here. Water in a jar,
uh what are they going to do here? Oh, they're going to pro, okay. So again,
with, with most succulents, many succulents,
you can twist the leaf tissue off.
So as long as you get the area where the leaf actually connects to the main
stem, if you get that tissue,
you can lay it flat on some sand or some cactus mix and mist it every few days.
And you will start to see roots come out.
It's a really easy way to propagate succulents.
They're sort of over-complicating it here, which is kind of how Blossom rolls.
That's just what they do. And so let's see what they end up doing here.
Let it grow for one to two weeks. I mean,
the thing that they're solving here is the constant humidity.
So it's not going to dry out too much.
Also what you typically do when you take a succulent propagation is you do let
it dry out for one or two days.
You let that cut callous over and you wouldn't put it in a super humid
environment. So again,
you're using a lot of plastic here that you don't have to use.
You should see roots there, there should be some sort of root tissue coming out.
Maybe it's right down there. I'm not quite sure,
that looks kind of like the cut, but either way, technically it works.
It's one of those, yes but why would you ever do it this way type of things.
Alrighty, Blossom, what do you got next for me? Colander, napkin,
cilantro seeds. And, okay,
so you're sandwiching cilantro seeds between two napkins and moistening them,
which actually works quite well for cilantro because it's a weird seed. It's,
it's actually quite a weird seed and it needs a little bit more moisture than
average to penetrate that seed hull. Uh,
typically when you're doing it as like a microgreen you put soil on top.
Most of the time when you grow microgreens you don't put soil on top,
but in cilantro's case you do. And so, so far so good,
but I'm curious what they're gonna do next here.
Keep in a sunny area for 10 to 30 days.
So we have an explosion of roots coming out. That's a lot of roots for that.
Okay. So yeah, this is one of those things where technically this would work,
although they wouldn't be looking that healthy I don't think.
Unless you put some sort of hydroponic nutrient in the water,
because you're growing it without soil. So inherently there's only water,
air and oxygen. There's no nutrients. And that's what a plant needs.
That's the fourth ingredient that a plant needs to survive.
So if you're going to grow cilantro like this,
do it in a tray and just put it in soil and it actually will work quite well.
And you'll get something very similar to that. This colander water thing,
you're gonna get algae buildup. You can get all sorts of weird things.
Soil is a great medium to grow plants in, obviously. Cut
a two liter bottle, I'm a big fan of two liter bottle projects. Big fan.
Two of them are in my first book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening.
So don't let me down. Okay. We're taking,
I did not know that that would fit. Honestly, I did not think that would fit,
but apparently it does. Uh,
I don't know. So I mean, yeah, like that's a pretty classic design.
There's ones you can buy at the nursery that have a little claw at the top and
hook it. But if you're only jamming it in there,
and the only thing that's holding that together is the friction of the wood
against the plastic interior, I don't know if that's really the best.
What you could do is maybe drill straight through.
Drill a pilot hole through both and throw a bolt through and throw a nut on the
other side. That would actually work. So this would be clever.
The only thing you have to do is make sure that you seal and secure that
attachment point of the two liter bottle. So that's kind of clever.
My grandpa had one of these. He used to grow, well he still,
he still does grow lemons, guava and some oranges.
And he has a one made out of bamboo. My grandpa's Filipino.
So he's a citrus master. Easy fruit picking. All right.
Strawberry container, damp napkin, broccoli seeds.
Those are not all broccoli seeds, that's for sure. It's like a,
some sort of mix. So this is just growing microgreens it looks like.
Microgreens, one of my favorite crops to grow.
I have about 10 videos on my channel about how to grow microgreens. In fact,
there's individual ones like lettuce or peas or pak choi.
But there's also a 42 minute video that's like THE way to grow microgreens
at home, released for free.
So check that out if you really want to know how to grow microgreens.
This is a perfectly fine way though I do prefer to grow them in soil.
You don't have to grow them in soil. Yeah. I mean that, honestly,
this is the best one that Blossom has done in this video so far. Okay.
Next up we've got sprouting seeds.
So honestly they might be two for two in this little sequence here.
So right now what they're doing is they're just throwing seeds into a bottle
with water,
water being the number one thing that a plant's going to need to start its life,
right? That signal. Cause seeds aren't dead, they're dormant.
And so when they get that signal, and one of the major signals is water,
along with soil temperature, things like that, they're going to start growing.
So that's what you're going to see happen here in just a little bit.
So poking some holes in there and oh, it's just for drainage. Okay.
That makes sense. And what do they have? Yeah, so you're going to get, I mean,
the annoying thing about this is that the,
the mouth of the jar of the bottle is really small.
So you're going to have to like shake it out or cut the bottle.
And then that destroys the bottle.
So it's a great way to like reuse a bottle I suppose.
There's probably better ways to reuse a bottle,
but most people when they're doing sprouts are sprouting in a wide mouth jar so
they can dump those sprouts right out. But honestly, that works.
So I would say they're two for two, which is, I never thought I would say that.
It's a nice looking sandwich too. I'm kind of getting hungry there.
Alright. What do we have here?
I have a feeling already that I'm not, okay.
I already have a feeling I'm not going to like this.
Don't disrespect rice water. Rice water and fresh corn. Okay,
so Blossom has like a weird thing about corn. Because last video I did,
they took a fresh corn, threw a skewer through it and then planted the skewered,
fresh corn kernels. Which there's two reasons. First of all, they're fresh.
They're not going to germinate. And second of all, uh,
you stabbed through them Blossom, so they're not going to work.
And so in this case.
Yeah so.
How did it dehydrate them? How does it immediately dehydrate?
You should let it dehydrate first and then plant it in the water.
And even then you don't need, okay.
I'm getting mad.
Yeah. I mean, sure, but corn,
you want to plant maybe six to eight inches apart in blocks.
And so what you would do is you'd have,
let's say you had four by four square feet.
You would probably put four per square foot.
And so you'd have somewhere around 64 corn. That might be a little aggressive,
maybe something like, I don't know,
48 corn in four square feet if you wanted to. And then corn is wind pollinated.
So when it comes up, it kind of rustles around in the wind.
And then the tassels up top will throw pollen,
they'll drop pollen down onto the silks.
And that's kind of how you want to plant it. If you do it this way,
you have to separate it from the corn cob and you have to then transplant it
into the ground and all this.
Corn is actually a really easy seed to just transplant directly into the ground.
And so I would recommend of course doing it that way. Alrighty.
We got some food scraps here. Everyone loves a food scrap hack.
You got some carrots, beets and it looks like some green onions. Yeah.
So I've done um, I think last Blossom video was all about the regrowing.
This stuff works. Honestly.
The best one to do is a green onion or any type of onion because that's sort of
a forever. You can come through,
mow it down with some clippers and you keep getting it. All these carrots, yes,
the tops regrow but you don't get the taproot,
which is what we call the carrot plant. Right? That's what we eat.
And so unless you're really in love with carrot top greens and you like to eat
those, then I don't recommend regrowing carrots.
It's best to just toss that in the compost. Green onions though,
that works really well. Another thing about green onions though, is like,
unless you're getting them from the store and wanting to regrow the ones you
bought from the store, if you're growing them in your garden,
just leave them in the garden. You don't have to pull them out,
chop them and then replant them. Just chop them and don't pull them out. Right?
Let the roots stay in the soil. What's next Blossom?
Classic teabag.
What's this, are they going to use it as a germination? Looks like it, yeah.
Place in a sunny area for seven days. But what seed was that?
That looks like early basil to me, I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean,
in theory this, I mean in practicality, it actually does work.
The question again,
it's one of those why would you do it when you can just plant in many other
different ways?
I mean what you could do with a teabag provided it's not made out of a plasticy
type of material, which weirdly enough, some teabags have a plastic in them.
When you're putting it in hot water like it doesn't make any sense. But anyways,
I typically will throw my teabags into the compost and let those compost out.
I just plant my seeds in a traditional way.
But if you really are feeling like you want to repurpose, then go for it. Okay.
We've done a video on this one before, banana peel fertilizer.
I've gotten sent this in DMs on Instagram like maybe a hundred times in the last
three months. Does this work? In theory, yeah it does work,
but the question is, are you getting enough? Cause the thing about this,
people will say, okay, well bananas have a lot of potassium.
Banana peels do too.
If you soak the banana peel in the water you're leaching that potassium out.
And voila, you have a.
High potassium fertilizer. Well, not really. I mean,
it's marginally higher than anything else you might soak in water.
The best use of a banana peel, to be quite honest with you,
is in the compost buried directly under in the soil,
in nice living soil or in your worm bin. It's best to do that.
Soaking it and then using that water,
it's just not a very good use of your time or resources.
It's just kind of a waste of time.
You might as well just compost it and use the compost in the garden instead of
soaking the banana peel. If you're like an apartment dweller,
then look into worm composting, Bokashi composting.
Maybe what you could do is blend it up hardcore,
strain it out and use the blended to water your plants with.
Cause you're gonna get at least a little bit more organic matter into the soil
that way at a really, really high overall surface area cause it's blended.
And then that'll break down a lot quicker and you actually get the organic
matter in instead of just diluting some of it into the water at really not that
much of a rate. Okay. So,
yeah that's not gonna happen overnight Blossom, I'm sorry.
This fertilizer is good for one to two weeks. Yeah. I mean,
we talked about this. We know it's called, again. What do we have here? Yeah,
that's not going to happen Blossom, I'm sorry. Mr. Coffee, used coffee grounds.
Big fan of coffee grounds. Okay. What,
what are they doing here? Putting a random mushroom in there,
more mushrooms and a coffee filter on top. What is happening here?
Store and grow for 30 days. Yeah, that's not really the way it happens. I mean,
you typically need a sterile, um, growing medium.
Coffee grounds actually are used to cultivate mushrooms. I've grown,
on this channel I've grown lion's mane mushrooms and Shitaki mushrooms.
Granted those were from pre-inoculated patches.
But what you have is you have a substrate, right?
The substrate is what the mycelium is growing through,
which is the underground network of the mushroom.
The mushroom that you see is the fruiting body of the mycelium.
And so you need a substrate.
Typically it's sterilized and it's inoculated with spores.
If you just take random mushrooms that aren't throwing out spores,
then there's no spores to inoculate that substrate and thus it won't grow.
So more, more than likely this will not work.
The only caveat is if maybe there are some spores in there or there's something
I'm not thinking about as far as mushroom cultivation.
But I've done a fair amount of it.
And I'm fairly confident that that's not an effective way to grow mushrooms.
There are a lot better ways to do it.
And actually you can grow a lot of mushrooms at home and get a ton of protein.
So, okay, here we go. Classic egg tray.
What are we doing here Blossom?
What?
Oh, okay.
Weirdly enough they actually ended it on a somewhat useful tip.
Like that's actually decent.
I thought they were going to plant it in the eggshell tray, which is,
that's not that bad of an idea.
The problem with planting in an egg carton is that it's not,
the roots aren't going to get out of that.
So you're gonna have to take it out anyways.
And also that type of paper product, it's like a recycled paper product,
wicks water out of the soil really fast.
So you'll have to keep watering in your egg carton.
So honestly what Blossom did there is probably the best thing to use an
eggshell carton for. I keep calling it an eggshell carton, an egg carton,
an egg carton. I keep thinking about doing it with eggshells too,
which a lot of people do that too. I don't recommend either.
I recommend starting your seeds in a seed starting mix of some kind,
whether that be something you purchased or something you made.
But these tiny little containers just constrain the roots and overall cause you
more work than they're worth. You can recycle eggshell,
you can recycle egg cartons or eggshells
1,000,001 different ways without doing it that way. So overall,
what would I give this compared to the other Blossom videos?
The first Blossom video I ever reviewed is absolutely the worst one.
I would say this is the best one I've seen yet.
They had maybe three to four actionable tips that
weren't terrible. If you're going for not terrible,
then I would say this is the best one.
So thank you so much for watching everyone.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.