The Kitchen Staple That'll Help Your Garden Flowers Thrive

Your garden flowers can suffer from any number of maladies, such as pests, diseases, competition from weeds, and an improper pH level in the soil. Weirdly enough, if you take a short trip to your kitchen and pull some baking soda off the shelf, you might have the perfect solution for all of these issues. Baking soda is an impressive substance, and its uses travel far beyond the kitchen. It's the common baking product that can de-ice your slippery sidewalk, it can help you keep your grill in tip-top shape, and you can even use baking soda on your outdoor adventure. Even better, humble sodium bicarbonate can make your garden thrive, too.

Before you begin pouring baking soda in your garden, it is important to note that this solution is not always appropriate. Similar to lime, adding it to your soil can slightly raise the alkalinity temporarily, potentially to a level that's too high for many plants to grow healthily. As such, you should only use it on flowers that prefer alkaline soil, such as carnations, lilacs, oleanders, and foxgloves. With these flowers, you might find that the baking soda actually helps them produce more blooms.

Once you're comfortable your plants will benefit from baking soda, thoroughly mix a few teaspoons of it with a liter of water, then pour the solution into a spray bottle. Spray the flowers and soil you wish to boost; you should soon see more blooms. To prevent disease affecting your flowers, you can add a few drops of dish soap to the solution, too. Combining it with commercially available garden soil that already has a pH designed for the plants you want to grow can be a great recipe for healthy, thriving plants.

Baking soda can also help deter pests. By dusting it on the soil around your plants (a flour sifter works well), you can repel pests such as slugs and ants (though with slugs it works best to apply it directly onto them). Apply it judiciously to the soil and not your flowers. Overuse could raise the pH levels of your soil too much, while non-diluted, powdered baking soda could damage the plant. This does mean baking soda is also an effective weed killer. Spray weeds with soap-and-water, then dust them directly with baking soda, it can actually kill them. Apply the same mix to the soil every week or so to prevent more weeds from coming up.