Introduction
Baking soda is an extremely versatile household product that is used everywhere from cooking to cleaning. However, it also has plenty of uses in your garden. If you need to modify your garden beds before using baking soda, you can search for “topsoil near me” and buy it from a reputable store nearby. Let’s check out how you can use baking soda in the garden.
The Details
- Baking soda for killing fungus on tomato plants – Tomato plants are highly prone to fungal diseases. Blight and leaf spots are early signs of fungal infection. Fortunately, you can easily take care of this problem with household baking soda. Mix baking soda with vegetable oil, water, and castile soap and fill that mixture in a spray bottle.
You can then spray this mixture on tomato plants to kill the fungus. Apart from fungal infection, this also works for powdery mildew on tomato leaves. Make sure to test the mixture on a couple of healthy leaves and wait for two days to check up on the effects.
- Baking soda for powdery mildew and rose black spot fungus – As mentioned above, baking soda is very effective for killing powdery mildew on tomato plants. However, this trick works as a preventative measure for other plants as well. If you have high humidity in your garden, it can affect plants like squash, zinnias, and cucumbers. Spray the above-mentioned mixture every week in your veggie garden. There’s no need to use it in sunny weather.
While baking soda disrupts the ion balance in fungus cells and kills them by changing the pH levels, it can burn the leaves if you use it excessively. That’s why you need to make sure that the mixture is diluted properly and is tested on a few healthy leaves before you use it for the whole garden.
Apart from killing mildew, baking soda is also effective at killing rose black spot fungus. Mic four teaspoons of baking soda with a gallon of water and use it as a fungicide on roses, vines, and grapes when the fruits start to appear after the pollination season.
- Garden cleaner – Baking soda has been used for a long time as a household cleaner. However, it can also clean your garden. It absorbs bad odors and can be used by itself or in a mix with other ingredients. Due to its slightly alkaline nature, it dissolves dirt and grease very easily and can remove it from multiple surfaces. Let’s check out a few common places where you can use baking soda as a cleaner.
- Hand freshener – If you’re an avid gardener, you get your hands dirty quite often even while you’re wearing thick gardening gloves. Your hands can get smelly after spending some time in the garden. You can use warm soapy water to clean your hands and get rid of the smell with baking soda. Just sprinkle it on your hand, let it sit for a minute or two, and rinse it thoroughly.
- Freshen up garden bins – Gardeners usually have a garden recycling bin in the backyard for collecting the yard waste. At the end of the city, the waste in bins is collected by the city to turn into mulch or compost. However, while the organic yard waste rots in your garden bin, it can get quite smelly and attract all sorts of wild animals. You can fix this problem with baking soda. Sprinkle a generous layer of baking soda at the bottom of the bin. Even if the bin gets full by the week, the smell wouldn’t be so awful.
- Clean garden furniture – If you have garden furniture made of wood or resin, the constant exposure to harsh UV rays from the sun can make the furniture look very dingy. You can use baking soda to get rid of that dull look and breathe new life into your old furniture. Mix a tablespoon of dish soap with half a cup of baking soda and a gallon of warm water and use a sponge to apply this mixture to your garden furniture.
You can use the same mixture for cleaning large plastic plants as well. If a piece of furniture is too dirty, you can always make a thick paste with castile soap and baking soda and use it to clean the most stubborn dirt buildups. Keep baking soda away from metal surfaces since it can corrode them quite easily.
- Make a plant fertilizer with baking soda – While baking soda itself can’t provide nourishment to plants, it can make a potent fertilizer when mixed with other ingredients. Combine a tablespoon of Epsom salt along with baking soda and household ammonia and put that powder mix in a gallon of water. Use this organic mix once every month by diluting it with water to boost the growth of your plants.
- Kill weeds – Instead of using toxic pesticides for killing weeds, most people like to use organic ways of getting rid of the green infestation. If you belong to the same group you may have used vinegar or laid down newspaper to deter weed growth. However, baking soda is as effective as those solutions, if not more potent. The only disadvantage of using baking soda is that it isn’t a permanent weed killer.
When you use baking soda at its full strength to kill weeds, it does kill new sprouts but doesn’t have the residual effect of preventing new weed sprouts. However, you need to be very careful with full-strength baking soda since it can also kill healthy plants or at least burn healthy foliage. Instead, you can moisten the weeds and sprinkle baking soda carefully at the top so that the baking soda spreads evenly on the weed without affecting healthy plants.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways of using baking soda in the garden. From cleaning your hands and deodorizing your garden bins to killing fungus and mildew. On the other hand, if you need topsoil for your garden or landscape projects, you can search for “topsoil near me” and buy it from a nearby store.
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