15 Viral Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner

I’ve shared hundreds of garden tips and tricks, but I’ve never put them all in ONE VIDEO! In this video, I’m sharing my 15 most effective gardening hacks, the ones that have gone viral and that thousands of gardeners use to grow more food with less effort.
From a product that guarantees you’ll never pull a weed again, to a planting method that boosts production, and a trick to get free plants for life, these hacks will change the way you garden forever. You’ll learn how to set up your garden right the first time, grow in the shade, protect plants naturally with herbs, overwinter your peppers, grow cilantro year-round, and even harvest a lifetime of zinnias from a single seed packet.
Whether you’re brand new to gardening or you’ve been growing for years, these hacks will help you get bigger harvests, healthier plants, and a more sustainable, organic garden.

IN THIS VIDEO:
➝ Shop the Easy Garden Kit: https://gardenary.samcart.com/products/easy-garden-kit
➝ Visit the Gardenary Shop: https://shop.gardenary.com/discount/YOUTUBE (use code YOUTUBE for 10% off!)
➝ Shop the Gardenary Planting Method: https://gardenary.samcart.com/products/gardenary-planting-method-limited-time
➝ Shop the Gardenary Fall Seed Collection: https://gardenary.samcart.com/products/fall-seed-collection-2025

Featured Hacks:
➝ NEVER Pull a Garden Weed AGAIN! This SIMPLE METHOD Makes It Possible! https://youtu.be/xaCMaZ15e0w?si=ymQdYOufZ4H1WLsc
➝ What Happens When You Dump an Entire Seed Packet in One Garden Bed (Weird Things I Do)

➝ The ONLY Way to Grow Tomatoes

➝ Why I Use Sand in My Soil (Weird Things I Do)

➝ How to Make Your Pepper Plants Last for YEARS!

➝ 20 Plants You Can Grow in the Shade

➝ Use This Simple Trick to Stop Rabbits From Eating All Your Plants

➝ My Number One Secret to Growing Loads of Cilantro

➝ Build Your Own Herb Garden for Under $50

➝ Companion Planting Tips That Actually Work

➝ How to Turn One Zinnia into a Zillion

➝ 3 Reasons to Stop Gardening with Fertilizer (and What to Do Instead)

➝ Plant These Herbs to Protect Your Garden from Pests

➝ How to Turn 1 Herb Plant into 1,000

Follow Gardenary Here:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gardenaryco/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gardenaryco
Garden Coaching: https://www.gardenary.com/coaches
Find a Garden Coach Business in Your Area: https://www.gardenary.com/businesses

Over the years I have made hundreds of 
gardening videos with thousands of garden tips and tricks hidden inside, but I have 
never made just one video that combined all my best hacks together. So today I 
am sharing my 15 most popular gardening hacks in just one video. My first hack is 
never pulling a weed in the garden again and the way I do this is by setting up 
the garden right the first time. Whenever I set up a raised bed garden, I make 
sure I clear all the ground cover that’s underneath the bed before I plant. And then 
my major hack is throwing away all that nasty plastic weed barrier cloth and 
using brown paper, ramboard, or cardboard instead. This works because this is a 
natural material that slowly breaks down. It doesn’t put plastics under your garden, 
and it keeps all of those root bound weeds from growing up into your garden 
space. So if you’re still using weed barrier cloth, toss that stuff in the trash and 
start using brown paper instead. My second hack is taking one packet of seed and 
dumping the entire thing in just one garden bed. This works because plants 
love to grow together intensively. Now you can’t do this with just any seed. 
This needs to be for leafy greens or for root crops. Most of those seeds are 
hard to keep separated and they’re also hard to know how to space them out in your 
beds. What I do is take one packet of seed, mix it up with sand, and then spread 
it out throughout the entire bed. This makes the most not just of every square 
foot in the garden but of every square inch. I keep the beds well watered for 
two weeks and within 45 to 60 days. I’m picking harvest every single day 
from that one bed because I seriously overplanted it. So if you’re just picking 
a few seeds out of a seed packet and just planting a little with a prayer and 
a hope for good production, you got to try my method of taking one packet of 
seed and just dumping it out in one bed. My third hack is planting the edge of my 
raised beds with tons of herbs to protect it from pests. I don’t use any chemical 
pesticides in my garden. Instead, I use plants to protect everything I’m growing. 
Herbs are an incredible way to protect your garden from pests because one, they put 
off a strong scent that can repel pests or confuse them when they’re heading toward 
your veggies. And two, they attract all kinds of beneficial insects that actually 
fight the bad guys off and do the heavy lifting for you. I use herbs like 
thyme, oregano, rosemary, basil. These are some of my best fighters in 
the garden that help me grow organically without ever having to use a spray. Hack 
number four is trading in my tomato cages for an arch trellis instead. Tomatoes, 
particularly the vining types, are not made to grow in a tomato cage. The 
plants overgrow a tomato cage within a few months and you’re left with this huge 
spindly mess and you’re unable to get to those tomatoes. Instead, I train tomatoes 
to grow up and over an arch trellis. This gives me five to six months room of 
growth as the plants go from one end of the trellis all the way to the other. 
I have easy access to the tomatoes the entire time that they’re growing and the 
results are also incredibly beautiful. My fifth hack is working coarse sand into my 
garden soil. Most gardeners use peat moss in their soil blend, but this has been 
proven to be a non -renewable resource. So instead of using peat moss, I work in 
coarse sand to my soil blend. Coarse sand allows my soil to get a lot of porosity, 
a lot of those great air pockets that vegetable gardens so desperately need. It 
lightens up the soil but it’s taken from a resource that’s much more renewable and 
sustainable. So instead of reaching for those bags of peat moss or a soil blend that’s 
made with peat, make my 103 mix instead. It’s got topsoil, compost, coarse sand, and 
earthworm castings all mixed together for a much more sustainable organic soil 
blend. Hack number six is wintering your peppers. Most people don’t know this, but 
peppers are what we call tender perennials, meaning they actually want to live for 
many years in the garden. They just get stopped because of frost and cold and snow. 
So in the fall, I overwinter my peppers by uprooting them from the garden, trimming 
the roots a little bit, trimming back the top stems, putting them in a pot, 
and then bringing them indoors for the winter. You can let them go dormant, or 
you can actually put them on a south facing window if you’re in the northern 
hemisphere let them stay inside during the winter and then pop them back out in the 
garden at the start of spring as soon as the thread of frost has passed. This makes 
the most of the money that you spent on your pepper plants and you can actually 
grow them year after year after year with this method. You got to try it. My seventh 
hack is one of the best for so many of us that don’t have a lot of sun on 
our garden and this is growing plants in the shade. Almost everybody I talked to 
says, “Niccole, I wish I could have a garden, but I just can’t because I don’t 
have any sun in my yard.” But I have shared so many hacks on how to grow in the 
shade. And the thing you want to focus on are leafy greens. Herbs and salad 
greens love to grow in the shade. In fact, a lot of them struggle when they’re 
growing in full sun. So if you’ve got a really shady yard, you’ve got to check 
out my hack of growing greens, growing leaves in the shade. So we’re talking 
gorgeous, delicious salad greens like romaine, butter crunch, arugula, spring mix. All of 
these grow great in the shade. And then we’re talking herbs, delicious herbs that 
cost a ton at the grocery store, like thyme and sage and chives. So if you’ve 
got a ton of shade in your yard, you can still have a garden. You just gotta use 
my hack and grow the leafy greens instead of the big fruit and crops. My eighth 
hack is how to keep bunnies out of your garden, at least how to keep them from 
eating your plants. And this is by setting up this really cool thing called a living 
fence. Most people are focused on building fences of wood and wire and like 
setting up their garden like Fort Knox, but instead the hack I use is creating a 
living fence. So a living fence is just that. It’s plants that surround your 
vegetable garden and protect it from little critters like bunnies. So when you set 
up a living fence, you use pollinating plants, you use native plants, you use 
grasses, and you let the plants do the fencing for you. This provides bunnies 
and rabbits a place to nest to have their young and to even eat without having to 
come into your main vegetable patch to find some dinner. If you’ve had trouble growing 
cilantro, you’ve got to check out hack number nine. And this is the way I grow 
loads of cilantro, literally tons of it every single year. And I do it by not 
growing it in the summer. You’ve got to ignore the cilantro that’s being sold at 
the hardware store and the local plant store if they’re trying to sell it to you 
in the middle of the summer. Cilantro loves cold. It likes cold weather. 
In fact, it doesn’t even mind frost, so you want to grow cilantro when it’s 
cold outside, when there’s a chance of frost. You can even put cilantro seeds 
into the soil right as winter is starting, and they are going to pop up and start 
growing for you as soon as the soil warms up just a little bit. It’ll grow even when 
there’s frost, even when there’s cold. So stop growing cilantro in the summer and 
growing in the spring, fall, and even in the winter if you’re in a mild area. 
Speaking of herbs, you’ve got to follow hack number 10, which is putting all your herbs 
into just one container. All the herbs we have in the kitchen can mostly be broken 
down into a few plant families. First, we have the mint plant family, and these 
are these big trailing herbs, things like rosemary, thyme, and oregano and sage. So 
in one container, you can put those herbs around the outer part of the container. 
They don’t need a lot of water. They don’t mind getting hot and they all love to 
trail. So they can all go on the outside of the planter. Then we have the herbs that 
we love to grow that are in the onion plant family, things like garlic and chives 
and scallions. These can be grown right inside the container on the inside of 
those mint plant family herbs. They’re not fussy at all. They don’t care if they 
have a lot of water or not a lot at all. and they also don’t need a lot of sun 
to thrive. So these can be right on the inside of those herbs. And then finally 
we have our herbs like cilantro, parsley, and dill. These are more particular, they 
wanna grow up, and they also have these deeper tap roots. So parsley, cilantro, 
and dill, they go in the center of the container. So there you have it, one 
container filled with all the herbs that you want to eat in your kitchen. Cilantro, 
dill, dillon parsley in the middle, the scallion chives and garlic around the 
middle, and then all of your trailing herbs along the outside. All the herbs you want, 
just one pot. Hack number 11 is throwing out that companion planting chart and 
understanding my plant categories instead. So my second book is called Leaves, Roots, 
and Fruit, and that is the method I use when I’m planting up my beds so that I’m 
never confused on what plants go together. So you can toss out all those charts and 
just use this method. Leaves go on the outside of the bed, root crops go in the 
next row, and then your fruit and crops grow down the middle of each and every 
garden. You want to be sure that you’re growing the plants together, leaves, 
roots, and fruit that all grow in the same season. So plants that don’t like frost 
should grow together, and plants that do like frost should grow together. So you 
find out If they like frost or not, and then you divide them into the categories, 
leaves, roots, and fruit, put them all together in one bed and never use a chart 
again. My 12 pack is growing a lifetime supply of Xenia flowers after 
buying just one packet of seed. So when you buy a packet of Xenia seeds, 
by the way, we have some right below this video for a steal of a deal, you 
empty them out and you’ll have 50 to 100 Xenia seeds right there, you plant them 
up, and each and every zinnias seed will start to produce flowers. When you prune 
the way I teach you, which is pinching back right above a leaf node, every time 
you cut one flower, you’ll get two flowers in its place. So you keep doing this 
throughout the season, and zinnias will grow pretty much nonstop when there’s no chance 
of frost. As you grow these zinnias, you’re going to pick the plants that have 
the biggest blooms, cut those off when they start to fade and then put them 
inside in a place where they can start to dry. The next spring you’re going to take 
each of those dried blooms and pull off every petal and hidden underneath 
each petal are seeds for that year. So one packet of seed could grow you 
thousands of Xenia blooms in one season and each of those blooms can give you 30 to 
100 more seeds for the following year. Garden math is crazy. My 13th hack is 
how to grow more food in less space with half the work. And it’s what I call my 
intensive planting method. You may have heard of square foot gardening. Well, this 
is square inch gardening. So I use every single square inch when I’m planting up 
my garden. And I do it by putting the plants in a tetris -like method, fitting 
them inside the garden so that there is no bare soil. So when you use my method that 
doesn’t need a chart of combining leaves, roots, and fruit that all grow in the same 
season together, you’re gonna smush them all into one bed so that they each get 
the amount of space they need and nothing more. This makes the most of every single 
square inch in your garden. It cuts down on the work you have to do because these 
plants love growing together and it massively increases your production per 
square foot because you’ve got so many plants growing in one space. My 14th hack 
is all about making free plants. This is one of the very first videos I 
ever put out on YouTube and it’s because it’s the way that I started my business 
over 10 years ago. My mom taught me how to root plants at a time when we had little 
to no money to buy plants. She would take little cuttings of plants in her 
garden and showed me how to put them into sand keep the sand moist and each of those 
little cuttings would create roots so that I could grow plant after plant after 
plant simply by cutting off the initial plant. Most other gardeners root their 
plants in water and while that method works great for growing roots it often makes the 
transplanting process really difficult but if you root those plants in a moist sand 
environment, they’re gonna transplant into the garden so much easier and you’re literally 
gonna be growing plants for free. And my 15th hack is never, ever, ever, ever 
using a synthetic fertilizer in my organic garden, but still getting massive plants 
that produce week after week for me. Synthetic fertilizers are everywhere when 
you go to a garden center, but they’re actually terrible for your garden. Synthetic 
fertilizers run off and mess up our water system. They’ve been shown to 
negatively impact wildlife, pollinators, and bees and butterflies that we care so 
much about. Plus, they stress your plants. They ask your plants to grow much faster 
than they naturally would, and they create this unhealthy dependence where your plants 
are waiting on that fertilizer to do their thing. Instead, I use all the other 
hawks I’ve shared today, having great soil where your plants can grow, planting the 
plants intensively, and then planting the edges of my garden with tons of flowers and 
herbs and things that are beneficial to the entire ecosystem, so that we have bees, 
butterflies, and just a naturally great environment that increases growth and 
makes the most of the natural resources available to each and every plant. You can 
watch the full step by step of each and every one of these hacks right below this 
video and you should start with my garden planting method. That’s what 
made all these hacks come true. You can watch that
video right here.