It’s the Little Things…

One of the first planty YouTube channels that I followed was Miss Orchid Girl, and she always did her plant work on a tray. I thought it was a great idea and found this 26″ x 18″ bakery tray. It was one of my best purchases for plants ever!

And if one tray is good, more is better. Right? These are 13″ x 10″ and are sold as seed sprouter trays. They come with a top mesh tray, but I haven’t found a use for those… yet.

The jury is still out on this one. I WANT to absolutely love it, but I don’t. The problem is that there is so much space between the drawers that they end up filled with dust, grime. My other drawer set doesn’t have drawers that seal, but they do keep a lot of dirt out. This one, at the very least, may end up in the garage.

I have confiscated every plastic or glass storage container with a sealable lid that we have around the house for whatever purposes I dream up. Everyone in my house knows to check with me before throwing away any container with a lid. My old Tupperware canisters from the 1980s are still air-tight. Coffee cans (is it still a can if it’s made of plastic?) are perfect containers for substrate, especially when you make your own potting mixes.

I absolutely love these scooping cups. You can get a big heaping scoop of substrate and the tapered spout allows for easy pouring. Because of their shape, you can pour a little or a lot while maintaining control over whatever you’ve scooped. I tried metal ice scoops, but I prefer these. Now I need to figure out where the othe six have walked off to.

Cleaning planters can be trying, especially when dirt gets into the edges and corners. For this, I bought a set of bottle brushes. These brushes are great for getting into tight spaces and the nooks and crannies where dirt goes to die.

I thought I would use this dustpan more than I actually do, BUT, when I need it, I need it. I don’t use it much for sweeping because we use a leaf blower to clean our patio. I use it more for cleaning up spills, especially when I spilled something I don’t want to throw away. So for that reason, I tend to keep it cleaner than your average dust pan. But that’s just me.

You may be wondering why I would need a hose when I have a perfectly good faucet on my potting station and that right next to my 25′ “plant hose” is a 50′ back yard hose. Well, it’s quite simple, Mr. MyPlants doesn’t like to keep a spray nozzle on the yard hose so he can use it on whatever he wants, however he wants. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for my plant hose, I want the nozzle left on so when I need it, all I have to do is take it down from the hook and squeeze the trigger. I use this hose to spray down my larger plants and to flush their substrate as needed. I also use it to rinse off my large bakery tray (above) when it’s dirty; you can’t do that in a shallow little sink.

This collapsible dish drainer is another favorite find of mine, if it were a little larger, I would love it even more. Since all of this is outside, it can sometimes get windy and plastic cups and planters are easily blown around. This dish drainer helps keep everything together. Bonus feature: it collapses down to slightly more than 2″ thick. I liked this so much that I bought one for the garage as well!