The Storage Tub Hack You Should Be Using In Your Garden
Potting new plants and repotting your favorite existing plants is a joyful, often therapeutic process for many people, and gardeners everywhere have created potting station setups to make the lovely ritual more efficient. A well-appointed potting bench will include all the tools, materials, and workspace a gardener needs to repot. One clever TikToker shows how adding storage tubs underneath the wire surface of his potting station's workspace to house and catch excess soil as he pots a plant on the shelf above helps to keep the planting process cleaner and saves extra soil for next time.
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When an active gardener does a lot of potting, they go through a ton of soil! Rather than create a mess on your potting station and discard extra perfectly good soil during clean up, this TikTok hack helps to ensure you are only using the soil you need while the overflow falls straight back into the bin. This clever solution keeps potting station soil supplies much higher than if the material was not recycled by smartly and efficiently putting a simple storage tub to work.
Creating a potting station with soil storage bin hack
To create a potting station with the TikTok storage tub hack, obtain an outdoor wire shelving unit with two to three tiers suitable for the outdoors and large, heavy-duty plastic storage bins that will fit on the second shelf. Alternatively, you could use a potting bench with a slatted, mesh, or wire top (like this one from Wayfair) or DIY one with coated wire shelves supported by cinder blocks on each end. The end result should be an upper shelf, roughly a countertop height (36 inches, give or take), with a perforated surface to use as a planting workspace and a lower shelf of storage bins, with at least one containing soil for potting.
When you are ready to use your new potting station, using these tips for choosing the right plant container, grab your pot and place it on the upper shelf of the potting bench. Partially pull out the storage tub containing soil, scoop out what soil you need, and push the bin back in place. The bin will then function as a spill-catcher for any overflow soil as you pot your plant, preserving the extra soil for the next potting. To achieve a similar hack in the garden when washing soil off of vegetables you have just harvested, prevent wasting precious garden soil by repurposing a grate and bucket to catch soil that would otherwise be washed away.