I love to find new ways of doing things, especially when they make life easier. This is especially true in the garden, where I’ve turned to a number of gardening hacks that are often not only easier but less expensive than methods I’ve used previously.

Try These Gardening Tips and Tricks

Here are the top 5 backyard garden hacks that have personally worked for me:

• Use flour to control aphids – Aphids can be the gardener’s bane and ridding plants of the little blood suckers can be tricky, especially if you want to avoid chemical controls. I used to make up a batch of environmentally friendly spray, but that can be time consuming, with iffy results on larger plants. My sister recently introduced me to a new method for killing aphids. Flour. Simple, plain all-purpose flour dusted over the infested plant. Yes, the plant turns white, but it is a temporary measure. The aphids ingest the flour which goops up their intestines and kills them. Then, it is just a simple matter of hosing down the plant.

• Give new life to those old tarps – Another terrific gardening hack has to do with tarps. Tarps are handy for a variety of uses but are invaluable in the garden. I use a tarp when I weed and prune, rake up leaves, and even for a heavy job, like when I removed all the river rock from an area to plant and then need to replace said rocks.

• Zip ties can be a gardener’s best friend – Zip ties are amazing and work well in the garden to hold up vines, tie to support stakes, and even to hang sunshades from the deck.

• The handy-dandy bucket – An ordinary 5-gallon bucket becomes extraordinary when used in the garden. I use it to hold weeds and small prunings, mix soil, lug water, carry garden tools, mix small amounts of concrete for outdoor repairs, and the list goes on. It can even be turned upside down to use for a garden stool.

• Double potting in the garden – Lastly, as a passionate gardener I have a lot of plants. Sometimes, I like to move them around or those that are tender need to be moved indoors during the winter. So I plant in a pot and then put the planted pot inside another pot that’s placed into a hole in the ground. Also called double potting, this makes it really simple to move plants around, especially if I’ve misgauged size or color or want to bring plants under shelter and indoors.

I’m sure as time goes by, I will pick up plenty more great garden hacks and probably even have a few that I’ve used so often I don’t think of them as hacks. I hope you can put these simple gardening tips and tricks into practice in your own landscape.