When it comes to indoor gardening, having the right tools is essential for a successful experience. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced gardener, these tools will help make your indoor garden thrive. Here are the 10 most important indoor gardening tools.
Hand fork
For loosening, lifting, and turning soil in houseplants, you won’t need anything super powerful, so forged steel tines aren’t required. A small hard fork with strong enough tines will do the job.
Comfortable grip handles are a nicety to have since obviously, the more comfortable the grip, the more you’ll like using it.
Pruners
If you do not have a good pair of pruners, you must get one. When you use low-quality or weak bladed pruners to snip off the leaves, the stems are crushed and shredded.
Tears can loosen the plants’ defenses, allowing insect infestations and a variety of plant illnesses to thrive. Don’t allow your pruners’ blades to get blunt whatever type you use.
Fiskars is a well-known, dependable go-to brand for long-lasting pruners.
Label Maker
The amount of nutrients you use is completely up to you. If you’re growing a large number of plants, however, this isn’t required. Labeling spray bottles with spray solutions or other chemicals you may use on rare occasions so that you know what’s what and when they were mixed is an alternative usage for label makers.
Indoor Watering Can
Unless you’ve converted your spare room or garage into an indoor nursery for cultivating a variety of plants, you won’t need a watering can with a three-gallon capacity.
If you don’t have a small novelty watering can, miniature watering cans will work perfectly. You may also use these to adorn your plant display with designs like a garden gnome watering can or an elephant watering can, in which the trunk doubles as the spout.
Do you want some advice on how to ensure that your plants are properly watered?
Get one with a long spout to make sure that the water is channeled precisely into the plants’ centers, avoiding water spraying off the leaves, which is wasteful.
Wi-Fi Plant Sensor
This isn’t a piece of must-have equipment unless you have a propensity to kill plants. In that event, it will be an extremely useful tool.
It’s a useful gadget since a decent plant sensor may provide you with crucial information regarding your plant type, including temperatures, humidity, and notifications to your phone to keep you on track with the proper amount of light and temperature for the room.
You don’t need this if you have a green thumb. If, on the other hand, you can’t seem to keep plants alive, the sensors, alerts, and growth advice will come in handy, especially with those pricey plants that make your eyes water when they’re sick.
Grow Tent
Use one of these to give your plants the best possible start in life. Small and foldable, with a high-quality grow tent that’s easy to put up and sturdy bars along the top for mounting grow lights, allowing your plants plenty of light and heat.
Fertilizers
Fertilizers are used to help plants grow. There’s a time to stop fertilizing your plant unless you’re growing it under grow lights with enough light for 12 hours each day. Because plants slow down their own growth during the winter, this is when they enter into a dormant period.
When they find out that you’re engaged, they’ll be ecstatic.
Growth will be modest, so it’s fine to let the plants rest since the foliage that develops in the winter won’t be as vibrant or resilient.
In early spring, when the plant begins to develop indications of growth, apply fertilizer to encourage it. The type of fertilizer you use will be determined by the plants you’re growing.
Take, for example, any plant cultivated in soil. The plant’s only source of phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen is the soil and fertilizer. Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are required for growth; they are obtained through air and water.
Air plants require six of the 12 nutrients to survive and develop, which is why they must be fed (in soil plants, at least). Air plants do not require fertilizer; however, they can be used once a month to stimulate budding.
Dehumidifier
A dehumidifier isn’t required in all indoor grow spaces. They’re quite useful for regulating the moisture level in the air, but so too are ventilation and air conditioning.
If you have decent ventilation and air conditioning, yet are still plagued with excessive humidity, such as seeing mold grow on your plants, water-rotting, or moisture-related plant diseases becoming a pain to manage, you’ll want to increase your humidity control.
That’s when a dehumidifier comes in useful for indoor gardeners.
Potting Soil
The type of soil to use will be determined by the plants you intend to cultivate. When it comes to most indoor plants, general all-purpose dirt works well, except for orchids, which require a more robust potting soil owing to their higher proportion of moisture.
First, soil with a starter charge is drenched with enough fertilizer to sustain the first few times of watering the plant, encouraging initial development. Slow-releasing soil doesn’t need any fertilizer added for about a month after potting.
Potting soils initially have a nutrient added to them, but this will not last long, depending on whether it is a starter charge or slow release type. Fertilizer should be used to fertilize soil plants in either case.
As for how often you should change the soil, this is a good moment to do it when repotting the plant. That must be done when the root system of the plant is well-compacted in its pot. Turn it upside down and remove it from the container, gently knocking the base of the plant pot to loosen it before lifting it out.
If it’s compacted and hardened, it’s probably outgrown the container for which it was intended. You don’t want to put it there because the more compacted the root system is, the less oxygen there is circulating.
When you do, raise the size of the plant pot. You can go as little as an inch wider, or up to 4 inches bigger. Don’t move from a tiny container to a big one; this will influence how much nourishment the plant receives.
Gradually increase the pot sizes as the root system grows stronger, allowing it to adapt without making big changes to the food and nourishment it’s used to.
Spray Bottle or Mister
A good dowsing isn’t always necessary for every plant. Some will do well misted on occasion, while others will require a daily dousing. It’s much easier to own a separate mister for your plants rather than trying to figure out which ones need it and which don’t.
A trio of misters would allow you to have one for daily use, another only for fertilized water, and the other on standby for any water you need to add chemicals to, such as pesticides.
