Odd Gardening Tips [That Actually Work]

Gardeners LOVE giving advice. It’s one of the things I appreciate so much about the gardening community – everyone wants to help everyone else! But sometimes, the advice can sound a little…yikes.

In this video, we’ll discuss some gardening advice that might sound COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. And we’ll talk about which are FACT and which are FICTION.

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Some great academic sources related to the myths in this video (listed in order of appearance in the video):

Garbage for Your Garden

https://ucanr.edu/blog/spill-beans/article/shake-tomato-plants

https://extension.psu.edu/garden-myths-watering

Can Plants Repel Problematic Insects?

https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/good-growing/2025-05-16-are-you-falling-these-gardening-myths#

https://www.montana.edu/extension/invasiveplants/extension/monthly-weed-posts/2021-june-does-vinegar-kill-weeds.html

00:00 Bury Banana Peels
01:36 Shake Your Maters
03:40 No Watering Midday
05:44 Pest-Fighting Flowers
07:25 Sweeten Your Soil
08:31 Natural Weed Destroyer

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Bananas contain tons of potassium. Now, mostly in the fruit, but the skins also have a decent bit of potassium, and potassium is one of the key macronutrients that the plants in your garden needs. It’s the K in NPK on the fertilizer package. So, one of the things that we’re told that we can do is we can actually bury our banana peels in our garden soil and let them break down in the soil and they will become this natural source of potassium. Now, this household consumes a lot of bananas. So, I have a good bit of banana peels that regularly make it into my compost bin. But one of the things that you have to be mindful of is that the larger something is, the longer it takes to break down. So if you’re growing tomatoes and you want to naturally boost the potassium in the soil, you could just take your banana peels and bury them at the base of your tomato plants and let them break down. And absolutely, as they break down, over time, potassium will be released into the soil. But I’d be willing to bet that it’s not going to break down as quickly as you’re hoping. Not unless you give it a jump start. So that’s why I recommend taking your banana peels and chopping them up or even blitzing them in a blender. Find a way to extract the nutrients from the banana peel and then introduce it into your garden. If you do that first, then this tradition is absolute fact. We tend to baby our plants a lot. And believe me, I’m guilty of it, too. I start basically everything that I grow in my garden from seed down in my basement. It’s time consuming. It’s an investment. It’s a labor of love. So, obviously, I want to make sure that I’m handling with care. But there’s a tradition out there that tells us that it’s okay to be a little bit rough with our plants. Now, take tomatoes as an example. Tomatoes can be pretty temperamental and they can be really fragile. So, you have to handle with care, but also know that with tomatoes, they’re self-pollinating, which means that their flowers carry both male and female parts. But those two parts aren’t just going to work together on their own. They need some sort of agitation in order to pollinate, in order to create fruit. And this is where the tradition comes in. Gently shaking your tomato plants in order to help them pollinate absolutely will increase your tomato harvest. Why? Because what you’re doing when you shake your tomato plant is you are agitating it. You’re giving the flowers the sensation of being blown in the wind. And what that does is it helps the male portion of the flower release some pollen that then gets absorbed by the female portion of the flower. And when those two things combine, that’s where you get your fruit. So, if you help your tomato plants pollinate themselves, then of course, at the end of the day, you’re going to have more tomatoes. Now, some people, they have some other interesting methods, like taking an old electric toothbrush and holding it up against the tomato plant and letting that vibration help with the self-pollination. Now, I don’t take it that far, but I do walk through my garden and make sure that I’m making contact with my plants. I shake them lightly or I tap them and that way I’m helping them create more fruit. Shaking or tapping your tomato plants to help with pollination is absolutely a fact. When it comes to watering your garden, one of the pieces of advice that you’re likely to most often hear is that you should never water your garden midday when the sun is overhead. Now, the reason why we’re told this is because we’re told that the droplets of water as they sit on the leaves of your plants will create a magnifying effect. Concentrating the sun’s ray directly onto the leaf and it’s going to cause your leaf to burn. But think about it this way. When you were a kid and you were using a magnifying glass and you were burning a piece of paper, how far away from the paper did you have to hold the magnifying glass in order to create a concentrated enough beam to burn the paper? Exactly. That’s why this is truly just a myth. It’s one of those traditions out there that has been passed along through the generations, but it really doesn’t hold water once you think about it. If you water your garden midday and some of the water droplets end up getting on your plant’s leaves, those droplets are not far enough away from the leaves in order to create a magnifying effect that is going to concentrate the sun’s beam and burn the leaves. Now, of course, you can come up against some different problems if you water midday. The biggest one being the fact that in the heat of the day, that’s when evaporation is at its highest point. So, you’re likely to find that you’re watering more frequently and you’re wasting water because a good bit of it is actually evaporating rather than benefiting your plants. That’s what you need to watch about from watering midday. Not that the droplets are going to collect the sunlight and burn your leaves. So, rest assured, you can absolutely water midday when the sun is shining right overhead. At the end of the day, this tradition does hold some value. You want to water earlier in the day before the sun is overhead so the water isn’t just evaporating from your garden. But when it comes to the idea that you should never water your garden midday because it’s going to burn your leaves, that’s fiction. Now, a good bit of gardening tradition is grounded in the idea of companion planting. And we’re not going to get too deep into companion planting in this video, but this is a little bit related. And it’s the idea that aromatic plants will keep pests away from the garden. Now, it’s true that aromatic plants like maragolds, mint, or other herbs will absolutely repel some pests in the garden, but really they’re only repelling pests from themselves. So the idea of companion planting is that you would plant maragolds near tomatoes. So they would ward off any pests that could attack the tomato plant. But really those pests are just going to stay away from the maragolds. Especially if you think about the fact that your tomatoes, if they’re indeterminate varieties, are going to grow as long as 8 ft tall by the end of the season. There’s no way that a maragold, which might max out at a height of call it 12 in, is going to defend an 8-foot tomato plant. But rest assured, there is definitely still credence to this tradition. Why? Because these plants, it’s not about what they repel, it’s about what they attract. And these aromatic plants, they bring in beneficial pollinators and beneficial predatory insects that are going to feed off of the pests that are going to mess with your other plants in the garden. So yes, do plant aromatics around your garden, but don’t do it to repel pests. Do it to draw in beneficial predatory insects and pollinators. And that is a fact. Another tale that you’ll hear when it comes to growing tomatoes is if you want to make them sweeter, if you want to lessen the acidity of your tomatoes, you should sugar the soil. Cuz the idea is that the sugar will be drawn up by the roots of the tomato plant, make its way into the flowers, and then the fruit will become that much sweeter. But the sweetness of a tomato is not determined by what its roots draw up from the soil. It’s determined by the variety of the tomato and plant photosynthesis. The sun helps to sweeten tomatoes. And there are some varieties that are just naturally sweeter or were bred to be sweeter while others are more acidic. So when it comes to you as a gardener growing tomatoes, if you want sweeter tomatoes, find a variety that is a sweet variety of tomato. If you want something that’s a little more zippy, a little more acidic, a little more bright, you can find plenty of tomato varieties that also fit that bill. But when it comes to sugaring your soil to make your tomatoes sweeter, I’m afraid that is fiction. Weeds will absolutely be attracted to a healthy garden, and that’s because you’re creating an ecosystem that gives them the nutrients that they want and that they need. And unfortunately, they can get unruly really quickly and they can start to out compete the things that you mean to grow in your garden. Now, many of us are interested in a natural or organic approach to gardening, which means that we don’t want to spray a bunch of herbicides around our garden in order to keep weeds at bay. So, what are the options for natural and organic gardening? Well, you can lay sheets of cardboard. You can mulch to keep weeds at bay. You can plant a cover crop that hopefully will choke out any weeds that are trying to take hold in your garden, but is there anything that you can use that can kill the weeds on site? And that’s where the tradition of using vinegar as a weed killer in your garden comes into play. Now, you don’t want to just add straight vinegar to a bottle and spray it onto plants. You want to create a diluted solution. And if you’re diligent about spraying that onto weeds, you will likely start to notice that the leaves begin to curl. They begin to brown. The plant above ground begins to die. But that’s the key. It’s the plant above ground. What you’re never going to get from treating weeds with vinegar is you’re never going to get root death. And when you have perennial weeds that you want to deal with, the roots are what you need to kill. So, while using vinegar in your garden is a viable option to kill the weeds above the soil level, really you’re better off just pulling weeds and getting at the roots. But when it comes to using vinegar in the garden as a natural weed killer, it’s a fact. I hope you found this helpful and that you found it to be a good balance of fact versus fiction in the garden. Let me know what you think about it in the comments below. Let me know which ones you’ve experimented with and what your findings were. Happy growing.