If you're like me, you probably want to make the best useof potential waste from your kitchen, things like coffee grounds, eggshells, banana peels in your garden so you canboost your fertility and boost the growth of your plants.
But you might not beusing these three things the right way.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardeningwhere it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb and really to helpmyself grow a greener thumb as well.
I love to dig into why we dothe things we do in the garden.
And these three things, coffee grounds, eggshells and banana peels are purportedto have a whole host of benefits in the garden.
And that's why in this videowe're going to say, is that true?, by looking at what these actually areand if they are going to do the things that many people say they'lldo in the garden.
And if not, what we should actually do with them inthe garden to get the benefits of these three amazing things that wouldotherwise go in the trash.
So without further ado, cultivate the Like button forEpic food scrap repurposing.
And let's get into the video.
Let's kick it off with number one, which is my personal favorite, a morningcup of coffee.
Here are some grounds.
These are actually my brother's beans.
The Epic brother roasts his own gourmetbeans at home and I get a little care package every now and then.
So I've been making my way through thisone very happily and the grounds do get into my garden.
But the way they get into my garden mightbe different from the way that a lot of people recommend.
Now number one, let's clear up a couple myths aboutcoffee grounds.
A lot of people will say, oh, don't add them to thegarden.
They're too acidic, they're going to damage your plants.
Well really most of the acidity you justdrank in your morning cup of coffee, so you don't have to worry about that.
The pH of the grounds themselves, somewhere around 6.
4 to 6.
7which is slightly acidic, I will give you that.
But remember most of our vegetablesactually like slightly acidic soil.
So that's completely fineand even if it wasn't fine, it's not going to change the pH of alarge amount of soil.
It's just not.
The level of grounds you would need todo that is more than you're going to have in almost any case.
Secondly, people will say, well use coffee grounds then aroundthe perimeter of a plant and that will actually create a barrierfor slugs and snails.
Kind of like putting like salt aroundyour house and a vampire won't go in.
It doesn't really work.
In fact, salt would be a better thing for theslugs or the snails rather than the coffee grounds.
It does not really work at all.
You want to use something like maybediatomaceous earth or you can use specific control methods for slugs and snails.
But there are plenty of videos of slugsand snails just crawling right over the coffee ground barrier and makingtheir way to munch on your plants.
So it is not a great ideato use it for that purpose.
So the question then becomes whatshould we use our coffee grounds for? You can use it as a mulch, but youwouldn't want to use it solely.
Because remember that it's a fineparticle and if you have too much of it, a couple inches of that is just goingto mat up.
It might go anaerobic.
It's just not a goodrecipe for a solo mulch, but you could mix it in or you could just, what I like to do if I'm going directlyinto my beds is just hand scatter it.
I'll just throw a little quick handscatter.
It's organic matter, right? It's eventually going to break down intosmaller constituent parts and make its way into our plants in the formof the elemental nutrients.
Eventually it gets down to that point.
Now, if you want to speed the process up, what you would do is you could throwyour coffee grounds into your worm composting bin, into your composting bin.
I just did a video on six differentways you can compost at home.
It would really work for any of those sixways and that is the way to use coffee grounds.
Don't go toocrazy.
Don't get too fancy.
Just either hand sprinkle them in yourgarden here and there or mix them into your compost.
Our second one, which is another favorite because theseseem to be recommended for just about everything in the gardenare eggshells, eggshells.
Why would someone recommend them? Well, it's something that we usea lot of in the kitchen.
It's something that has somenutrients in it.
There's 34% calcium, a bunch of trace nutrients in eggshells, and so it makes sense thatwe start to think, okay, how can we use these in the garden? Let's cover a couple of ways that arerecommended and why they might not be such a good idea.
First of all, when you crunch up these eggshells andwe're sprinkling them around our plants, again, they don't reallyprevent slugs or snails.
They just simply don't and it'snot a great use of them.
Second, a lot of people will say, okay, well you can actually bury these in thebottom of a hole where your tomatoes or peppers are and it will add some extracalcium and that will help prevent blossom end rot on those plants.
For those of you who are unaware, blossom end rot is when the bottom orthe blossom end of your tomato or pepper or eggplant starts to turn brown.
And that is a calcium deficiency, but it is not for the reasons you think.
It's not simply becausethere's not enough calcium.
It's because the calcium that's therecan't actually get to the place in the plant it's supposed to be.
For example, it wouldn't be a good idea to give memore air if I'm drowning if the air's in another room.
I don't care thatthere's more air in that room.
I want air in the room that I'm in.
So it doesn't make a lot ofsense again to bury this.
And the second reason really, which ties into the third reason, is because they don't break downthat fast.
They really don't.
Even in a compost bin, theydo not break down that fast.
The only way to use eggshells, in myopinion, there are two different ways.
Number one, you can actually breakthem up, put them on a baking sheet, you can dry them out and get them niceand brittle and then you can blend them into a powder.
What that's doing is that's taking thesurface area of this and fragmenting it.
And so the surface area, the effective surface area of thismatter right here just explodes.
The number goes way up and it makes itway easier for it to be attacked by all the different beneficialbacteria, microbes, et cetera, that do break it down eventually.
So it will break down quickerif you do it that way.
And actually another good thingyou can do again, dry it out, crunch it up and put itin your bird feeders.
Birds seem to really like it and theextra calcium does seem to actually help them a bit.
And so that's the wayI personally like to use mine.
I just crunch it up and I throwit in my bird feeder and boom, the cycle continues.
Our finalone is the humble banana.
Now bananas have a couple differentthings people will often recommend.
First of all, they say, okay, wellbananas have tons of potassium in them.
And remember potassium is the K ofN-P-K, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, one of the three main macronutrientsthat plants need to really put on Epic growth.
So it can't be a bad thing thatwe're adding potassium to the soil, right? No, it actually can't bea bad thing.
It's a good thing.
Generally speaking, the, some of the resources on the internetare showing crazy high potassium numbers for bananas that simply aren'ttrue.
It is higher certainly, but it's not a crazy source.
If you would want to do that, if you're using it for that purposeof adding a lot of potassium, you could just add an organic fertilizerthat does have a high NPK ratio on the K side, that high potassium.
Now I'm not trying to say don'tbury this banana in the soil.
You certainly could.
At least thebanana peel, you want to eat the banana.
But what a lot of people will also dois they'll make a banana peel soak.
So they'll sort of soak this inwater and then they say, okay, well that's going to have a nice littletea effect and then watering that will do something.
It will dosomething to some degree.
The potassium can actually get intothe water.
It's, it's somewhat soluble, but it's not going to makea really big impact.
Again, this feels like a tip that a lot ofpeople have come up with simply because we all eat a lot of bananas andthere's a large amount of waste.
And we want to think of things to dowith it and so we somehow treat it in a more special category than we would anyother type of organic matter.
You know, for me, what do I do with bananas? IfI want to throw them in my worm bin, I'll chop up the peel nice and fine, so the surface area again is higherand my worms can break it down quicker.
Or I'll just throw it into my compostbin and let it break down and then I'll work that into the soil.
NowI could just bury the peel.
That's certainly a good idea.
I choose not to because I'm in a niceurban environment and there's a lot, a lot of digger pestsand I try to avoid that.
Now I know it kind of seems like I wasraining on the parade a little bit of some of these really popularhacks and tips and tricks.
But sometimes us humans in the garden, we like to overcomplicate and it's alot better to take a step back, analyze, look at what something really isand just keep it simple.
You know, coffee grounds, compost them, throw them in your worm bin, sprinkle them here and there.
Don'tget any more complex than that.
Banana peels pretty much just compostthem.
Throw them in your worm bin, bury them if you really want to.
Andeggshells, you can crunch them up.
You can really, really blendthem up and you're good to go.
Maybe throw them in yourbird feeder.
Besides that, don't try to cast any magic spells.
Don't try to do any potions.
It's just gardening guys.
So I hope that was helpful.
If there's something that you actuallyfind to be really effective that I didn't mention about these, drop it inthe comments and until next time, good luck in the gardenand keep on growing.
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