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Viral Plant Hacks You Didn’t Know You Needed—All With Ingredients in Your Home

From eggshells to tea bags

Watering a succulent arrangement

 Anastasia Dobrusina / Getty Images

You walk into a Home Depot, visit The Sill online, or stroll through your local plant store and find what you consider the perfect plant for your home. Maybe you’ve done the research to find out just how much sunlight and water it will need, or perhaps you're just going off of how you feel at the moment.

Either way, you take it home. Perhaps you repot it into a new planter and enjoy it for a few days. Then, the nightmare begins—it starts wilting, or the leaves turn brown, or they start falling to the ground, or you start getting little bugs all over the place.

Sometimes taking care of plants is more complicated than it seems. Thankfully, we’ve got some viral TikTok plant parent hacks that might solve every plant parent’s woes. Armen Adamjan breaks down many of these plant hacks pretty well in his TikTok account @creative_explained, which has over 6.3 million followers.

“Gardening and plants have been a hobby for me since I was 24 years old,” Adamjan explained on his website, adding how great it is to be able to “combine my love for plants with my love for creating videos.”

In a world where plant parenting can sometimes feel like navigating a jungle of uncertainty, it's comforting to know that solutions are often just a TikTok video away.

  • 01 of 06

    Cinnamon and Milk

    For instance, if you have powdery mildew and black spots on leaves, you can make your own creation to shoo it away.

    Combine two teaspoons of cinnamon, one cup of milk, and one cup one water, and strain that into a spray bottle to create some natural plant medicine.

  • 02 of 06

    Coffee Grounds

    Don’t throw out your coffee grounds, either. By dumping used coffee grounds into a bowl with a teaspoon of cinnamon and a cup of club soda, you’ll create a mineral-packed natural fertilizer for plants.

    Apply it to the soil of your plants once every two weeks and, as Adamjan says, “watch your plants love you."

  • 03 of 06

    Banana Peels

    If you don’t already compost your banana peels, there’s another banana peel hack that could save your plants, too.

    Chop up your banana peels, put it in a cup or bowl, fill it with water, and let it soak for at least an hour. You’ll collect a bunch of the banana’s potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium in the water, all of which will help plants create stronger roots and healthier stems—the perfect plant water.

  • 04 of 06

    Ground Eggshells

    The same goes for egg shells, which you might typically compost. Instead, save the egg shells by crushing them up into a bowl and sprinkling them directly onto the soil of your indoor and outdoor plants, which will give them some extra nutrients and keep some pests away. It’s just another sustainable hack for your plants.

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  • 05 of 06

    Hard Boiled Egg Water

    The sustainability doesn’t stop there. You can even save the water you use to hard boil your eggs, because, while your eggs are boiling, they’re releasing some calcium into the water.

    That calcium-infused water is healthy for growing plants. Let your water cool down first, and then water your plants.

  • 06 of 06

    Tea Bag Fertilizer

    Using more household products, you can create your own fertilizer. Simply cut open a tea bag and mix that with a tablespoon of oats in a cup.

    Fill the cup with boiling water, let it steep for at least an hour, strain that, and you’ll have a nitrogen-packed fertilizer.