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A mailbox placed in a garden can add an aesthetic element as well as a spot to store regularly used items such as gloves and tools.

I was getting ready for spring gardening and making sure I had a good supply of red chili pepper flakes in my gardening carry-all when I stopped to wonder if I had shared what to use the pepper flakes for and other items I have in my bag with my readers.

Melody Fitzgerald is a McLennan County Master Gardener who has spent more than 35 years facing the challenges of Central Texas gardening.

I decided you needed to know about these ideas so you can use them in your gardens also.

First, let me mention the red pepper flakes. I hate snails and they hate red pepper flakes. I had spent years battling them in my garden as they decimated my lettuce and irises as well as other important plants each spring.

Nothing that I tried worked until I used red pepper flakes. All you have to do is find a big container of them at a discount store and sprinkle them around the plants you don’t want the snails eating holes in.

If it rains heavily, repeat. Snails will leave the area and not come back. Now my vegetables don’t have holes eaten out of them and my irises are safe. I carry my pepper flakes in my gardening carry-all along with other things that I need to share with you.

One of the things I carry is a Pringles can with a good fitting lid. Inside it is filled with my favorite fertilizer. Now I can easily sprinkle fertilizer on anything that looks like it needs a nutrition boost without having to drag out my 20-pound bag of fertilizer from storage.

I just refill when it runs low, about twice a year. I sprinkle it at the foot of the plant and then lightly scratch it into the soil. Not fuss, no muss.

I also carry alligator-type hair clips in my bag. These come in all sizes and are great for clipping floating row cover in place over plants that need protection from cold or insects such as broccoli or kale.

Experiment with different sizes to see what fits your needs the most. I like a collection of various sizes that have a nice hinge on one side so they can be squeezed to open and close. You will probably find several uses for these around the yard.

Along the same line as clips are zip ties. Buy these at a dollar-type store where they are cheap. I use a lot of them during the year. They are handy for attaching all kinds of things together.

You can use them to secure tomato cages made from fencing or wire mesh where you have cut them to make cylinders out of the fencing around tomato plants. Draw the zip ties closed around the wire and they will stay together all season.

You can even use them to tie a heavy branch to a support if you are afraid it will break under its load. This is another thing you will find lots of uses for besides the ones I have named. Keep them with you in the garden so they are handy for when you need them.

Plastic forks can help against another garden pest — digging cats. Stick the plastic forks into the ground in the garden where cats like to dig with the prongs sticking out of the ground. The cats will have to go somewhere else to find a place to dig. Sorry, my furry friends.

If you keep a mailbox in your garden, you can store lots of supplies in it and keep off rain and dirt. You might want to have an extra pair of gloves or clippers for when you accidently left your others in another part of the garden.

It saves a lot of trips to fetch these things if you have a handy storage space for them in the garden. Some people mount the mailbox on a post for convenience. It could be painted with flowers or leaves to make it decorative, if you are creative.

There is another tip you should know that doesn’t exactly fit in your carry-all bag. This tip is about marigolds. All through the season, if you will plant marigolds around your tomatoes and other plants, the insect pests will gather on the marigolds and then you can just pull up the flowers and throw them in a garbage can with a lid.

You will be surprised at how many pests will congregate on your marigolds. I call these “sacrificial marigolds” because you have to discard them. You can then plant more marigolds and begin the process over again.

This is a good way to get rid of bugs without resorting to pesticides if you are trying not to use these harsher methods. It works quite well if you can stand to pull them up and replace them often.

Another tip that could save you some money is to buy Christmas tree plastic storage containers. These look exactly like the smaller plastic storage boxes with lids that you see all the time in the storage section of your store, but these are at least twice as long.

You can drill holes all over the box, especially at the bottom and lower sides, then fill with potting soil and you have a container for growing vegetables that can hold a lot of plants. In other words, raised beds, readymade.

If you look for these in early January sometimes they are on sale as soon as the store thinks no one else is going to buy them to store their artificial Christmas tree.

That’s how I got mine for a song. I liked that it was green, too. That’s a good garden color. You could eventually fill an area with these sitting in rows to create a nice raised-bed garden area.

I hope that these tips help you out in the garden. Think creatively and many common household products can often be used in the garden for something completely different than it was intended. You never know.

If you find something else, let me know so we can share it with everyone. Until then, happy gardening! 

Melody Fitzgerald is a McLennan County Master Gardener who has spent more than 35 years facing the challenges of Central Texas gardening.

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A mailbox placed in a garden can add an aesthetic element as well as a spot to store regularly used items such as gloves and tools.

Melody Fitzgerald is a McLennan County Master Gardener who has spent more than 35 years facing the challenges of Central Texas gardening.

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