Plant Hacks On TikTok That Are Actually Worth Trying

TikTok has trends and hacks for everything, including gardening. Plant hacks on TikTok, as with many online garden hacks, do have a tendency to be hit and miss. They often sound a little crazy, and quite often they may or may not work. Worry not, as we’ve sorted through some of the many TikTok plant hacks to find the garden hacks that actually work.

Plant Hacks on TikTok That Can Help You With Your Gardening

As with anything online, and especially creator content on social media, there are a few ideas and tips on TikTok that you might have to take with a degree of scepticism. Some simply won’t work and might even do more harm to plants than good. If you are a new gardener, it’s better to take advice from experts rather than TikTokers.

However, more experienced gardeners may well learn something new from these online creators. You’ll need to use your experience as a guide to determine if the tips can be trusted and seem worth trying. Here are five that are definitely tried and true. 

1. Water Houseplants from the Bottom Up

Many experienced houseplant owners have been doing this garden TikTok hack for years. It’s a bottom-up watering technique that allows water to better penetrate the soil and soak the roots. Place a potted plant with drainage holes in a tray of water. The dry soil and roots will pull water up from the tray.

The benefit of this hack is that the soil gets moistened more evenly. It also allows you to avoid wetting the leaves, which can contribute to disease in some plants. If you do use this hack, just remember to top-water the plants once in a while to flush out accumulating minerals.

2. Regrow Store-Bought Vegetables

This is a fun project and a good way to save money, but it doesn’t work for all veggies. Start by regrowing green onions, which are almost always sold with some roots attached. Use the top of the onion and stick the base with roots in water or potting soil to grow more onions.

You can keep regrowing potted herbs from the grocery store by using cuttings. Remove several stems and stick them in water or moist potting mix to regrow several new plants. You can also try placing thin tomato slices in moist soil to see what grows from the seeds. Hybrid tomatoes from the store don’t grow true from seed, so you’ll likely get a different type with this TikTok gardening method.

3. Grow Plants Vertically

Most people see gardens as horizontal spaces, with rows of beds or containers set on a patio. If you don’t have a lot of space and want to grow more, one of the most compelling plant hacks on TikTok advocates planting upwards. Growing vegetables vertically isn’t new, but young gardeners are figuring it out and sharing it as a garden TikTok hack.

A classic way to grow a green wall is to use a trellis or fence to train a vining or trailing plant to grow up. You can also get much more creative. Hang an old shipping pallet from a wall or fence and use the slats to grow small plants like flowers or herbs. Line them with garden fabric and fill the spaces with soil. You can upcycle old plastic containers to use as hanging plant pots.

4. Fill Big Containers on the Cheap

Whether you have raised beds, large planters or big decorative pots, filling them with good soil is very expensive. TikTok has some useful, money-saving hacks for this problem. For a large pot, fill the bottom with used plastic bottles and top with soil. The bottles fill a lot of the space and make the pot lighter and easier to move.

For raised vegetable beds in the garden, you can use garden waste, like broken twigs and sticks, to fill the bottom layer. Top that with leaf litter, compost and, finally, good-quality soil.

5. Save Your Rainwater

This is another TikTok trend that isn’t new to experienced and eco-conscious gardeners. Use a rain barrel to collect rainwater from the downspout on your home. If you get a lot of rain at once, and it’s going to overfill, don’t waste the extra. Remove some of the water and store it in buckets or old milk jugs so the rain can continue refilling the big barrel.

Use collected rainwater to water houseplants, potted patio plants, vegetable gardens and any areas of the garden that don’t get enough rain.