Baking soda has endless uses inside your home but did you know it’s just as amazing and versatile outside? Check out these clever uses for baking soda in the garden!
Baking soda is the gift that just keeps giving, isn’t it? There seems to be no end to the clever ways that you can use baking soda around the house, but did you know that there are also many uses for baking soda in the garden? Since I always have baking soda on hand in large quantities, I’m trying to make use of it in the garden more often this year. It’s an easy, affordable, and natural way to tackle quite a few challenges in the garden and it’s one thing that I can feel really comfortable using when I have the kids out there with me. If you think that adding baking soda to your gardening bag of tricks sounds right up your alley, check out a few of my favorite uses below!
Uses for Baking Soda in the Garden
For Blooming Plants
A lot of blooming plants, like hydrangeas and begonias really like alkaline soil. Just add about 1 tablespoon to about 2 quarts of water and feed this mixture to your blooming plants to help encourage better blooms.
For Your Tomatoes
Sprinkle a little baking soda around the base of your tomato plants and you’ll get sweeter tomatoes! Lowering the acidity in the soil with baking soda will result in less acidic and sweeter tasting fruit at the end of the season.
For Those with Acidic Soil
If you have acidic soil, you can mix baking soda right in to the soil to make it more alkaline! The exact amount will vary from garden to garden, so just mix some in, water it, and then re-test your soil a few days later.
Test for Acidic Soil
How do you know if you have acidic soil? Check out our easy tutorial: How to Test Soil Ph Levels
To Keep Compost Smells Down
We all know that baking soda is a great deodorizer around the home, but it turns out that it does the same thing pretty well outdoors too! If your compost pile is getting particularly smelly, or if you have a smaller yard and find you can smell it from your home, try sprinkling baking soda over your whole compost pile every once in awhile to keep the odors in check.
To Clean Dirty Hands
You can actually use baking soda for a lot of cleaning uses in the garden, like cleaning flower pots and tools, as well as your lawn furniture, but the one thing that I clean most often with baking soda is my dirty hands! I do love my gardening gloves, but I tend to forget them every once in awhile, or I go outside to do something else and end up digging in the garden, so my hands and my fingernails end up caked in dirt on a fairly regular basis. A little baking soda helps that dirt just melt right away!
Do you have any other ways that you like to use baking soda in the garden?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.