The Most Unhinged AI Gardening Hacks You Don't Want To Fall For
Social media is awash with genuinely useful tips and ideas for gardeners of all levels, from clever propagation hacks to affordable alternatives for plant supports and raised bed building. Unfortunately, it's also given rise to an endless supply of hacks that range from ridiculous to the downright dangerous, unnecessarily complicated to actively destructive and harmful. With the rise of AI-generated content now in the mix, it's just getting worse.
Now, some of these viral garden ideas probably won't do much beyond waste your time and money. Others could damage your plants, interfere with healthy soil, and expose you and your pets to unnecessary chemicals. I'm a master gardener with over 20 years of experience as a permaculture specialist. I love to see people share useful tips and tricks that can improve soil health and the quality of your plants, but I can also spot the bad ideas easily, even when they sound reasonably sensible at first glance. I've gathered some of the strangest unhinged AI gardening hacks currently circulating on social media so you can see what's nonsense, how to know whether what you're looking at is worth trying, and whether it's AI.
Planting seeds with a stiletto
This AI hack is harmless, but so silly. I don't remember ever looking at a seed packet and thinking that planting instructions would be greatly improved by a pair of high heels. Social media, however, disagrees. This video demonstrates pushing the heel of a stiletto into the soil repeatedly and dropping seeds into the resulting holes. The best I can say for this hack is that it might make fashionistas find planting a little more enjoyable.
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There's really no reason that I can see to waste time and over-complicate something as simple as planting seeds by involving a shoe, aside from the fact that I don't even own any heels and would rather spend my time in comfortable not-toe-crushing flats. This tip just doesn't make sense. If you want to plant seeds that require individual holes and you've properly prepared your soil, you can just use a finger. If you don't want to repeatedly drill your finger into the soil, use a stick. If you want to be really fancy, get yourself a lovely old-fashioned dibber, which is just a fancy polished stick with a nice grip (though it does make you feel like a proper real gardener).
Planting tulip bulbs inside cardboard tubes
If a video were to say, "AI made me and nobody stopped to question whether it was a good idea," it would be this one. The hack is simply utterly and completely pointless. The video shows cardboard tubes packed into a deep trench before tulip bulbs are dropped into the individual tubes. This is not an established bulb planting technique. It's just one of those weird AI-generated gardening hacks that seems visually satisfying and offers a solution to a problem that isn't actually a problem.
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There are many fantastic tips for growing tulips in your garden. This isn't one of them. I can't see any good reason why you would plant tulip bulbs inside cardboard tubes other than perhaps you'd get them in neat rows. You can do that with a string and a pair of sticks at either end of the row anyway. It's just a lot of unnecessary work. As the cardboard becomes wet, it will get soft and collapse, and could stay wet against the bulb and cause rot until it decomposes. You can plant tulips closely and in a straight row, or a pattern for a beautiful dramatic display, without having to construct an underground cardboard tube system.
Burying a raw egg under a plant
Burying a raw egg under a plant is easy to understand in theory, because eggs contain nutrients. It makes sense that some people might think that cracking a raw egg into the bottom of a planting hole might be a good way to fertilize new transplants, but it's not. At least not when done the AI way. Burying raw fish scraps is a better option in my opinion, as the scraps contain the right balance of nutrients to make a real difference to your plants. Raw fish scraps make excellent tomato fertilizer, and work for other heavy feeders, too. If you follow the proper process and bury raw eggs deep enough, then honestly, while they're not harmful, a couple of raw eggs wouldn't make that much difference to soil health, as they are mostly water by weight.
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If you were to follow the advice in this video, you'd end up burying a lump of protein, fat, and moisture in a small container very close to the surface. It would smell as it broke down, attract animals because it's a food source, and potentially create an environment for harmful bacteria, as it is so close to the surface. If you want to bury kitchen scraps like raw fish or even raw eggs, make sure that you bury them in the earth and not a container — 18 inches below the surface, to be safe.
Making planters from cement-soaked fabric
Although this video is yet another one of the AI slop creations making the rounds (just look at the wheelbarrow with all the handles), the hack itself isn't new. Some version of cement-dipped towel planters have been circulating online for years and they're all equally terrible. The tip usually involves draping a towel soaked in cement over an upturned bucket, letting it harden, turning it the right way up, and then calling it a planter. Really, it's just a waste of perfectly good cement and towel. It's garbage. A thin coating of cement over a towel might look pretty when you first paint it, but it's not practical as a planter. It's weak, fragile, and can break just with the pressure of wet heavy potting mix.
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Plus, if you don't put drainage holes in a container, excess water can't escape and you will rot the roots of your plants. Fresh cement is also very alkaline and can change the pH of nearby soil. As for the first few weeks, lime-containing compounds leach from the concrete into the surrounding soil. Save yourself frustration and disappointment, and just look for a beautiful secondhand concrete planter at a local yard sale. There are also plenty of household items you can turn into beautiful planters.
Using a homemade sharp metal tube to transplant seedlings
Another insane, pointless, and dangerous so-called hack that "solves" a not-problem. While there are specialized transplanting tools for very specific plants and situations, this badly improvised version is one that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. This irresponsible video shows using an angle grinder with a cutting disk attached, wearing just a gardening glove and cutting right above his foot, while only wearing a walking shoe. Don't ever do this if you want to avoid serious injury. The tool itself is nonsensical. You'd be wasting a huge amount of time and effort creating this "tool" for no reason at all.
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The device essentially forces a small plant and its root ball through a narrow gap into a planting hole, but it has rough edges and probably isn't a good size. Nor will it work in anything but the loosest soil. Save yourself time, energy, and loss of toes, and just dig a hole with a trowel, a dibber, or even a stick.
Melting household plastic into garden pavers
More mind-numbing AI drivel in this video, and it's an alarmingly common theme. There has been a weird rise in the number of AI slop videos showing people melting down shredded plastic waste and turning it into other things. In this case, it's garden pavers and stepping stones. Please don't try this. It's absolutely not safe, and the end results won't be anything like the fake video suggests. Aside from the practicalities, such as different plastics requiring different behavior when heated, there are the inherent dangers. Heating or melting plastics causes thermal degradation, and when that happens, all kinds of fumes, including carcinogens, and tiny particles are released. This can be exceptionally dangerous if inhaled.
The idea behind these hideous videos is that the end product is eco-friendly, because you're diverting plastic from landfill. But a plastic paver like this would just degrade if it was placed outdoors, and it would shed microplastics into the surrounding environment. Plus it wouldn't stand up too much to abrasion, foot traffic, or temperature swings. If you did walk on it when it was wet, it would be slick and incredibly dangerous. This is definitely one supposed hack that I strongly recommend you skip for your own safety. Just take your unwanted plastics and put them in the correct recycling or disposal receptacle.
Building a tiny tire pond and filling it with koi
A koi pond is a lovely addition to your outdoor space if you build it well and maintain it, but a tiny pond made of two old tires filled with koi is a dreadful idea. This video is another piece of AI garbage that should never have been posted. It's junk of the worst sort, and the idea of keeping any fish, let alone large koi, in this kind of tiny setup is indefensible and ridiculous. Koi are big fish and they need lots of space, good water circulation and oxygenation, as well as excellent water quality.
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This hideous video has so much wrong with it, from the idiotic idea of using two tires stacked to create a pond and calling it good, to filling it with fish without adequate space or any filtration or pump. If you want to have a koi pond, do it properly. Build a pond or buy a molded pond liner of a suitable size to house the number of fish you want to keep in a healthy manner. Remember you need ample volume of water per fish to minimize water temperature changes and to give them more space, so they're not overcrowded. You'll also need a decent filtration and oxygenation system to keep your fish healthy and water quality at suitable levels. If you want an up-cycled water feature then do so, but make sure you use suitable materials, not an old tire (which is hazardous environmental waste), and keep it fish free. You can build a fantastic water fountain with concrete blocks and a little elbow grease.
An ironing board wedged in a tiny pot doesn't make a good trellis
This one is just bizarro. There's just no way that this would work. This just must be another one of those ridiculous ideas that AI probably came up with and the creator thought it would be a good idea to post. It isn't. Skip this hack altogether. Don't be fooled into even giving it a try. An ironing board wedged into a small pot with another pot balanced precariously on top would be top-heavy, unstable, and prone to rust. Common sense tells you that flowers cannot just pop up and grow in a dense suspended cascade with no soil or support. As a master gardener, this kind of nonsense really annoys me.
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There are plenty of wonderful ways to create floral features in your garden without resorting to this drivel. If you want a cascade effect, you would need to secure the upper pot safely to a wall or sturdy trellis, then use garden wire or a simple frame made from canes and wire or wood for the plants to grow down. The best option would be to grow climbing plants in the base and let them grow up the trellis towards the upper pot. Do note though that it would take some time to fill out. The plants, as they approached the upper pot, would be sparser, too. For you to get a cascade even remotely like the AI fake, you would need a more complex setup with soil pockets below for the plants to grow through. This, of course, would be much heavier and would need far more robust support.
This is not how you make topiary
The AI version of topiary or shaped hedges and grasses is truly weird. This is 100% not how it works. The chicken wire frame. The way the plants obediently fill the mold and barely poke through. How easy it is to remove the frame and shave down the fake plants. And how they magically light up from within. It's just so dumb. The tiger and the horse, in particular, are utterly ridiculous. As is the grass hands. What, exactly, is that grass growing out of? Because they didn't put any growing medium inside.
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If you want interesting shapes, look to fantastical flowers. Wherever you live, there are plenty of plants with big, beautiful showy blooms. You can also learn how to espalier different types of fruit trees to get easy-to-pick fruit and wonderful shapes and lines. And, of course, you could learn about actual topiary. It takes a great deal of time and patience, but if uber-formal hedges cut into incredibly precise shapes is how you get your garden joy, (or if you just loved the topiary scene from The Shining), then go for it.
Sheet mulching and growing flowers doesn't work this way
This fake AI human is doing a spectacularly good job of showing you how not to sheet mulch. She's laying stuff in the wrong order and notice her pristine white tennis shoes don't ever get a speck of dirt on them or leave a single impression in the compost. And look at the way she sows seeds. Directly onto cardboard in a super-dense layer. That's not going to work. Especially not when half the flowers that miraculously pop up so wonderfully lushly are bulbs and tubers, and the other half appear to be roses, which don't grow from seed either. I firmly feel that if you really must use AI for garden content, you should at least have some vague understanding of how gardening works. You're responsible for the advice you put out there, even if you got AI to spew out a bad video in place of filming it yourself.
@modernconstructiondiy Turn Kitchen Waste Into a Beautiful Garden Bed
If you really do want to sheet mulch, laying cardboard instead of landscape fabric at the base is perfect. Then add logs, twigs, hedge clippings, and grass cuttings. Next layer in any compostable kitchen scraps like vegetable peelings and some straw or shredded newspaper. Now you top it with a good few inches of finished compost. Then it's ready to plant into. But sensibly. Make sure you space seeds according to their sowing instructions, and at the proper depth.