Ditch the gardening gloves — expert shares the 3 reasons you should be rubbing a bar of soap under your fingernails instead
However, if you end up getting your hands deep into soil, or you don't have one of the best gardening gloves at hand, there is one thing that many of us hate after doing our chores.
Luckily, TikTok expert Andre The Farmer shared his quick and clever hack of how to solve this problem, with a simple bar of soap.
Dealing with dirt under fingernails after gardening can be a chore in itself. And to save you the time of scrubbing away, this TikTok hack is a clever idea.
In his TikTok video, Andre starts by explaining, 'If you're like me and don't like to wear garden gloves, this tip is for you.'
He then demonstrates by scratching into a bar of soap to get the soap under his fingernails.
'This is going to do a number of things, ' he explains.
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
'One, it's going to prevent dirt from getting under nails, two, it's going to be easy to wash off when you're done and three, soap actually repels insects.'
We recently shared the benefits of using soap when gardening. According to experts, soap is a great, non-toxic repellent in the garden to deter common pests including aphids, slugs, and mealybugs. This is because such destructive bugs hate the sweet fragrance and soap residue, and will either kill bugs on contact, or keep them far away.
What's more, the soap disrupts the outer coating of soft-bodied bugs, which will suffocate and dehydrate them, causing them to die.
So, while the main benefit of rubbing soap under your nails is to keep them clean when gardening glove-free, it will also have the added benefit of repelling common pests, protecting your plants.
This gentle soap is made from plant-based cleansers without heavy perfumes, parabens or harmful additives. Making this safe to use around the home and yard.
This unusual tip was met with impressed comments saying how 'clever' it is, and one posting, 'Thank you, That is a Supreme Tip….. Love it'. Another user even mentioned, 'My granny taught me this as a kid.'
What's more, using a bar of soap in the yard can protect your plants from destructive bugs such as aphids, mealybugs and ants.
Who knew that the humble bathroom staple could do so much more than just clean and freshen your skin?
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
9 hours ago
- New York Post
Should parents pay for classroom supplies? Ticked-off teacher sparks back-to-school debate: ‘Crying over crayons'
This teacher's ticked. An enraged educator is calling out her students' penny-pinching parents over their refusal to chip for a few additional back-to-school supplies the school district allegedly can't afford — adding fresh fuel to the ongoing debate over who pays for what in public education. 'Just so we're clear, I'm expected to take a bullet for little Johnny and his classmates,' began Randi's viral rant on TikTok, which has now received over 1.4 million views. 4 Randi, a teacher, blasted parents who are not buying supplies for their kids and classmates to use throughout the school year. Lucia PSV – 'But little Johnny's mother does not see it fit to provide for the community with some Clorox wipes, some tissues, maybe an extra pack of pencils?' The redhead's hot take comes as NYC educators report shelling out hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to bridge budget gaps — even turning to crowdfunding in a desperate attempt to drum up the necessary cash. Cash-strapped parents aren't pleased with the nationwide trend — with one Tampa-based mom virally vowing not to purchase any school supplies for her five children ahead of the 2025 fall semester. She argued, in part, that the onus is on teachers and school administrators to provide educational tools and utensils — much like it was the parents' burden to furnish all learning implements while homeschooling during the COVID-19 lockdown. The conversation carries on amid a nationwide teacher shortage — with Empire State learners taking a hard hit. 4 Some parents argue that they should not be expected to furnish classrooms with learning supplies, when schools failed to provide educational tools for remote-learning during the pandmeic. Elena – A whopping 86% of New York schools find it difficult to hire qualified candidates — while over 60% of those already on the job report being dissatisfied with their career, per recent data. Meanwhile, burned out educators are walking away from the chalkboard for more inancially-stable positions as private tutors — and even Hooters waitresses. And while the revved-up Randi hasn't publicly announced any plans to leave the desk and teach tots one-on-one, or sling chicken wings, it seems the professional is more than fed-up with unhelpful folks. 4 School supplies have become a hot-button issue between teachers and parents online. David Tran – 4 Randi noted that she'd be forced to make 'the ultimate sacrifice' for her students in the case of a school shooting, while parents aren't willing to make a monetary sacrifice for the children in their communities. Taras Grebinets – 'I have to make the ultimate sacrifice for the community, the school,' she said, doubling down on the dangers of being a teacher. 'But little Johnny's mother does not think she has to make any sacrifices for the community?.' The commentariat appeared to side with the indignant instructor — concurring that little Johnny's mommy is a big meanie. 'Everybody wants a village but nobody wanna be a villager,' a commenter chimed, scolding folks who are unwilling to pitch in to meet classroom budget shortfalls. 'Parents complaining about school supplies are the same parents that don't sit down and read with their kids,' another spat. 'Johnny's mother also thinks you should be providing for Johnny out of your own pocket, because they do not value teachers,' an equally peeved onlooker added. 'These parents are taking it out the wrong people,' wrote another. ''If they don't wanna shell out money for school supplies, they should be up at those board meetings [and] electing better representatives, fighting for public school funding. Not on this app crying over crayons.'
Atlantic
13 hours ago
- Atlantic
Are We Witnessing a Marriage Comeback?
'There is zero statistical advantage' to getting married if you are a man in America today, Andrew Tate argued in a viral 2022 video on 'why modern men don't want marriage.' Women, he believes, are worthless anchors—'They want you monogamous so that your testosterone level drops,' he posted on X last fall—and your marriage is likely to end in ruin anyway. 'If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married,' there are none. The loudest voice in the manosphere is infamous for many things, including criminal charges of human trafficking, rape, and assault. (Tate has denied these charges.) But he is also notorious for launching a new front in the culture wars over marriage, aimed mostly at teenage boys and young men. Tate believes that men no longer receive the deference they deserve from women in marriage, and bear more risk in divorce. He argues that men should focus on getting strong, making lots of money, and using—but not investing themselves in—the opposite sex. His evident appeal—clips of Tate garner hundreds of millions of impressions on YouTube and TikTok—would seem to be yet one more sign that our oldest social institution is in trouble. Brad Wilcox: The awfulness of elite hypocrisy on marriage Critics on the left have been questioning the value of the institution for much longer, albeit from a different angle and with less venom than Tate. The realities of marriage in recent decades no doubt provide fuel for several varieties of criticism. Before divorce became widely permissible in the 1970s, difficult marriages—and even dangerous ones, for women—were by no means rare. Many women's career dreams were thwarted by the demands of marriage, and some still are today. Many men have been hit hard financially and sidelined from their children's lives by divorce. Innumerable children of divorce have had their faith in marriage extinguished by their parents' inability to get along (a pattern that may help explain Tate's animus toward the institution; his parents divorced when he was a child). Some of these dynamics are both a cause and a consequence of the great family revolution of the late 20th century—one in which divorce and single parenthood surged. The share of prime-age adults (25 to 55) who were married fell from 83 percent in 1960 to 57 percent in 2010, according to census data, and the share of children born to unmarried parents rose from 5 to 41 percent. These trends have left Americans bearish about marriage. Until 2022, the share of prime-age adults who were married was still on a long, slow downward march. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, a plurality of men and women were 'pessimistic about the institution of marriage and the family.' From the October 1997 issue: Can the government prevent divorce? But reports of marriage's demise are exaggerated. Rather quietly, the post-'60s family revolution appears to have ended. Divorce is down and the share of children in two-parent families is up. Marriage as a social institution is showing new strength—even among groups that drifted away from the institution in the 20th century, including Black and working-class Americans. And contrary to criticisms on the left and right, that's good news not only for America's kids, but also—on average, though not always—for married men and women today. 'If the ongoing revolution in family and gender arrangements is largely irreversible,' the progressive family historian Stephanie Coontz said in an address to the National Council on Family Relations in 2013, 'then we have to recognize divorced families, single-parent families, and married-couple families are all here to stay.' At the time of her talk, the divorce rate was about twice as high as it had been in 1960, though it had come down somewhat from its 1981 peak. Nonmarital childbearing, meanwhile, had recently climbed to a record high. But even as Coontz spoke, two important shifts in family dynamics were under way. First, the decline in the divorce rate was accelerating. Since the early 1980s, the divorce rate has now fallen by almost 40 percent—and about half of that decline has happened in just the past 15 years. (Unless otherwise noted, all figures in this article are the result of my analysis of national data.) The idea that marriage will end in failure half the time or more—well entrenched in many American minds—is out-of-date. The proportion of first marriages expected to end in divorce has fallen to about 40 percent in recent years. Second, nonmarital childbearing, after almost half a century of increase, stalled out in 2009 at 41 percent, ticking down to about 40 percent a few years later, where it has remained. For children, less divorce and a small decline in childbearing outside wedlock mean more stability. After falling for more than 40 years beginning in the late 1960s, the share of children living in married families bottomed out at 64 percent in 2012 before rising to 66 percent in 2024, according to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. And the share of children raised in an intact married family for the duration of their childhood has climbed from a low point of 52 percent in 2014 to 54 percent in 2024. A third shift may now be under way as well, although it is much less established than the first two. The rate of new marriages among prime-age adults, which hit a nadir during the pandemic, has risen in each of the three years of data since 2020. In 2023, the most recent year available, it was higher than in any year since 2008. At least some of this increase is a post-pandemic bounce, but the share of all prime-age adults who are married has also leveled off in the past few years, which suggests that the decades-long decline in the proportion of Americans who are married may have reached its low point. Listen: The new divide in American marriage Some of these shifts are modest. Coontz was surely right that couples and families in the U.S. will continue to live in a variety of arrangements. And particular caution is warranted as to the number of new marriages—it is quite possible that the longer trend toward fewer people marrying will reassert itself. But as a likely success story for those who do wed, and as an anchor for American family life, marriage looks like it's coming back. Stable marriage is a norm again, and the way that most people rear the rising generation. The Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has observed that 'marriage represents the keystone institution for most—though not all—societies and may be the most primeval of human institutions.' On every continent and in every era, in more patriarchal societies and more egalitarian ones, it has governed family relationships. As an institution, it seems to build on the 'evolutionary psychology of both men and women,' writes Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Yale, which 'is to exchange love for support.' The institution's record contains no shortage of injustices. In many times and places, marriage has been bound up with the oppression of women. (This article focuses mostly on heterosexual marriages, because marriage was not legal for same-sex couples until very recently.) Still, given the long history of marriage's persistence, its recent resilience in the U.S. should not be shocking. Nor should the reasons for that resilience. As it has before, marriage in the U.S. is adapting to changing circumstances and expectations. It is different now from the institution that looked so troubled in the late 1960s and the '70s. One notable example is family care. Most marriages in the United States today are not throwbacks to the '50s when it comes to domestic responsibilities; husbands are more willing to lean in. The amount of time that American fathers spend on child care increased from 2.5 hours a week in 1965 to nine hours in 2024, according to Pew and the American Time Use Survey. Over this same period, the share of time spent on child care by dads rose from 25 to 62 percent of what moms provided. Indeed, one reason the United States' birth rate may be higher than those of East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea—where the fertility rate has fallen to 1.15 and 0.75 babies per woman, respectively, well below the U.S. rate of 1.6—is that men in those countries do much less child care and household labor than men in the U.S. Even as women around the world embrace the 'egalitarian frontier,' in the words of the social scientist Alice Evans, men in some cultures have maintained their old habits. 'As a result,' Evans writes, 'the sexes drift apart.' This may help explain why South Korea has seen marriages tank and its fertility rate fall to the lowest in the world. There is no single model for a good marriage in the U.S. today, and most couples have their struggles. Men still do less child care and housework, and disagreements over the division of household labor are a source of tension for some couples. Many women still value some traditional traits in men, such as breadwinning, and some men's unreliability as breadwinners is a source of strain for them and their wives. A 2016 study on divorce published in the American Sociological Review found that when a husband was not employed full-time, his risk of divorce shot up by 33 percent the following year; when a wife was unemployed, her odds of divorce did not change. Employment difficulties among less-educated men are a big reason marriage rates are lower among the working class than among college graduates. Olga Khazan: Why it's so hard to get so many men to do more housework But on the whole, marriage confers benefits to women and men alike. According to the 2024 General Social Survey, married men and women ages 25 to 55 are more than twice as likely to be 'very happy' with their life as their nonmarried peers. Married people—men and women both—live longer, are more financially secure, and build more wealth than single Americans. In 2022, I worked with YouGov to survey some 2,000 married men and women, asking about their overall marital happiness and how they'd rate their spouse on a range of indicators. The happiest wives in the survey were those who gave their husbands good marks for fairness in the marriage, being attentive to them, providing, and being protective (that is, making them feel safe, physically and otherwise). Specifically, 81 percent of wives age 55 or younger who gave their husbands high marks on at least three of these qualities were very happily married, compared with just 25 percent of wives who gave them high marks on two or fewer. And, in part because most wives were reasonably happy with the job their husband was doing on at least three out of four of these fronts, most wives were very happy with their husband, according to our survey. In fact, we found that more than two-thirds of wives in this age group—and husbands, too—were very happy with their marriage overall. I believe it's important for teen boys and young men to hear the entirety of this message. Marriage changes men, but not in the nefarious ways Andrew Tate might think. Men work harder and find more success at work after they get married; they drink less as well. And marriage can channel noble characteristics and behaviors that have classically been identified with masculinity: protection, provision, ambition, stoicism. That's good for both men and women—and can help young men identify and work toward a model of prosocial masculinity that diverges from the one being peddled by manosphere influencers such as Tate. Marriage's comeback is good news for society: Children raised in two-parent homes are much more likely to graduate from college than those raised in other families, and less likely to be incarcerated. Kids who don't live with both of their married parents are far more likely to be depressed than those raised in intact families. After surveying the research on child well-being, the economist Melissa Kearney concluded that the 'evidence is clear, even if the punchline is uncomfortable: children are more likely to thrive—behaviorally and academically, and ultimately in the labor market and adult life—if they grow up with the advantages of a two-parent home.' Her view reflects the mainstream academic consensus on family structure and children today. Melissa Kearney: A driver of inequality that not enough people are talking about But marriage's comeback is, of course, incomplete. Although the trend may be starting to reverse, the share of all Americans who get married has fallen significantly since the '60s, and there is abundant evidence that many young adults today are reluctant to marry, or are having trouble finding partners they want to marry. In particular, marriage has become more selective over time socioeconomically. A majority of college-educated Americans ages 25 to 55 (62 percent) are married, versus a minority of less-educated Americans (49 percent), according to the 2023 American Community Survey. This bifurcation did not exist half a century ago and is one reason marriages are more durable today: Money makes everything easier. The plight of working-class men in the labor force is worth underlining here. Among prime-age men, the less educated are nearly twice as likely not to be employed full-time as those with a college degree. And as working-class men's connection to the labor force has frayed, so too has their connection to the ties that bind. If, as a society, we want more adults to see their way into a lasting and happy marriage, then we would do well to focus on helping these men find their way to good jobs first. But the idea that successful marriages are attainable only by certain groups today is misguided. Since 2012, divorce rates have been falling for working-class Americans and Black Americans, too—and the share of kids being raised in married families for these two groups has stabilized. (In fact, the proportion of Black children being raised in a married-parent family rose from 33 percent in 2012 to 39 percent in 2024.) And across both class and racial lines, marriage is linked to greater happiness, household earnings, and wealth for women and men. Derek Thompson: America's 'marriage material' shortage In the past, American society has readily advocated for behaviors that can improve lives and reduce social problems—campaigns against smoking and teen pregnancy are two examples. We should at a minimum strive to ensure that young people have an accurate understanding of marriage today, not one that's outdated—and certainly not one supplied by cranks and zealots. Marriage is not for everyone—of course it isn't. But men and women who are flying solo—without a spouse—typically report their lives to be less meaningful and more lonely. The share of unmarried men ages 25 to 55 who say they are unhappy in the General Social Survey more than doubled from the late 1990s to the 2020s. That fact alone highlights just how wrong Andrew Tate is about men and marriage.
Tom's Guide
15 hours ago
- Tom's Guide
IKEA's new $14 storage gem will double your space — and it's perfect for dorm rooms
When it comes to home organization on a budget, you can always rely on IKEA to instantly maximize your storage space. And if you have a college student getting ready to move into a dorm room, it's very easy to get overwhelmed with too much stuff. This is especially the case if it's a tiny dorm room with limited space. Luckily, IKEA is now selling a new space-saving solution that makes use of vertical space, and is perfect for college dorms. This spacious storage box is ideal for storing essential college dorm items. It measures 30 x 30 x 42cm and comes with a secure lid. Plus, its light gray-blue color looks stylish. The TRÖSKNING Bin with lid is just $14 is originally designed for sorting dry waste to be recycled; however, these can be used to store any item, such as school or craft supplies, or even dried food goods. What's more, it's 7 gallons deep, which is adequate to store plenty of items, and is freestanding or stackable to maximize space. Plus, its neat design adds a modern touch to any room decor, without the expensive price tag. Perhaps my favorite thing about this storage bin is its versatility. You can either have them freestanding or stacked up in a corner, buying you extra floor space. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. It also has a handy feature of an opening slot at the front to quickly drop items in, without removing the whole lid. Plus, the two integrated handles make it easy to lift for easy portability. Making the IKEA TRÖSKNING Bin the perfect, dorm room essential. So if you want to double your space, you'd better grab one (or two) today. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.
