Give Your Garden Planters A Major Upgrade With This Wine Cork Hack

If you live in a city — or even just an apartment with no outdoor space — chances are your options for greenery are limited to container gardening, which is ideal for tiny homes and yards. Whether you have a single pot or a whole array of them, there are many difficulties in successfully growing your plants in pots. Fortunately, there's a TikTok hack that promises to seriously up your container garden game using your leftover wine corks for drainage.

Cork is actually a natural substance, made from the bark of the cork oak, that is incredibly useful in a wide array of applications. It's a dense material that blocks out liquid, gas, sound, dust, and fire, thanks to its impenetrable cell walls and the high concentration of air trapped inside. This impermeability allows it to act as an insulator across many applications, and in the case of container gardening, cork is an insulator against packed soil, allowing space for both root growth and water drainage.

As soil sits in a planter pot and gets repeatedly watered, it packs down further and further into the base of the container. Over time, this can impede sufficient drainage, which could ultimately kill or harm your plants if they sit in too much water. Many planters come with drainage holes already cut in the bottom of the pot, but to prevent this in the case where drainage holes aren't already provided, you need to build drainage into your planter — space that the potting soil won't fill, air can flow around, and that the water can slip through. Some people use rocks for this, but if you don't have any large rocks in your yard or don't have a yard at all, leftover wine corks are a handy and sustainable option.

It's literally as easy as taking your leftover corks and dumping them into the bottom of your planter, although because you're looking for the natural impermeability of cork, plastic wine corks won't work here. Simply fill the bottom of your container with natural wine corks, covering the entire base. Then, add your chosen potting soil and plant (or seeds) as directed. You've created a healthy environment for your plants to grow in your containers!