If you're like me,
you probably want to make the best use of potential waste from your kitchen,
things like coffee grounds, eggshells,
banana peels in your garden so you can boost your fertility and boost the growth
of your plants. But you might not be using these three things the right way.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a
greener thumb and really to help myself grow a greener thumb as well.
I love to dig into why we do the things we do in the garden.
And these three things, coffee grounds,
eggshells and banana peels are purported to have a whole host of benefits in the
garden. And that's why in this video we're going to say, is that true?,
by looking at what these actually are and if they are going to do the things
that many people say they'll do in the garden. And if not,
what we should actually do with them in the garden to get the benefits of these
three amazing things that would otherwise go in the trash.
So without further ado,
cultivate the Like button for Epic food scrap repurposing.
And let's get into the video. Let's kick it off with number one,
which is my personal favorite, a morning cup of coffee. Here are some grounds.
These are actually my brother's beans.
The Epic brother roasts his own gourmet beans at home and I get a little care
package every now and then.
So I've been making my way through this one very happily and the grounds do get
into my garden.
But the way they get into my garden might be different from the way that a lot
of people recommend. Now number one,
let's clear up a couple myths about coffee grounds. A lot of people will say,
oh, don't add them to the garden. They're too acidic,
they're going to damage your plants.
Well really most of the acidity you just drank 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 6.7 which is slightly acidic,
I will give you that.
But remember most of our vegetables actually like slightly acidic soil.
So that's completely fine and even if it wasn't fine,
it's not going to change the pH of a large amount of soil. It's just not.
The level of grounds you would need to do that is more than you're going to have
in almost any case. Secondly, people will say,
well use coffee grounds then around the perimeter of a plant and that will
actually create a barrier for slugs and snails.
Kind of like putting like salt around your house and a vampire won't go in.
It doesn't really work. In fact,
salt would be a better thing for the slugs or the snails rather than the coffee
grounds. It does not really work at all.
You want to use something like maybe diatomaceous earth or you can use specific
control methods for slugs and snails.
But there are plenty of videos of slugs and snails just crawling right over the
coffee ground barrier and making their way to munch on your plants.
So it is not a great idea to use it for that purpose.
So the question then becomes what should we use our coffee grounds for?
You can use it as a mulch, but you wouldn't want to use it solely.
Because remember that it's a fine particle and if you have too much of it,
a couple inches of that is just going to mat up. It might go anaerobic.
It's just not a good recipe for a solo mulch,
but you could mix it in or you could just,
what I like to do if I'm going directly into my beds is just hand scatter it.
I'll just throw a little quick hand scatter. It's organic matter, right?
It's eventually going to break down into smaller constituent parts and make its
way into our plants in the form of 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 throw your coffee grounds into your worm
composting bin, into your composting bin.
I just did a video on six different ways you can compost at home.
It would really work for any of those six ways and that is the way to use coffee
grounds. Don't go too crazy. Don't get too fancy.
Just either hand sprinkle them in your garden here and there or mix them into
your compost. Our second one,
which is another favorite because these seem to be recommended for just about
everything in the garden are eggshells, eggshells.
Why would someone recommend them? Well,
it's something that we use a lot of in the kitchen.
It's something that has some nutrients in it. There's 34% calcium,
a bunch of trace nutrients in eggshells,
and so it makes sense that we start to think, okay,
how can we use these in the garden?
Let's cover a couple of ways that are recommended and why they might not be such
a good idea. First of all,
when you crunch up these eggshells and we're sprinkling them around our plants,
again, they don't really prevent slugs or snails.
They just simply don't and it's not a great use of them. Second,
a lot of people will say, okay,
well you can actually bury these in the bottom of a hole where your tomatoes or
peppers are and it will add some extra calcium 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 or the 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 because there's not enough calcium.
It's because the calcium that's there can'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 me more air if I'm drowning if the air's in
another room. I don't care that there's more air in that room.
I want air in the room that I'm in.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense again to bury this.
And the second reason really, which ties into the third reason,
is because they don't break down that fast. They really don't.
Even in a compost bin, they do not break down that fast.
The only way to use eggshells, in my opinion, there are two different ways.
Number one, you can actually break them up, put them on a baking sheet,
you can dry them out and get them nice and brittle and then you can blend them
into a powder.
What that's doing is that's taking the surface area of this and fragmenting it.
And so the surface area,
the effective surface area of this matter right here just explodes.
The number goes way up and it makes it way easier for it to be attacked by all
the different beneficial bacteria, microbes, et cetera,
that do break it down eventually.
So it will break down quicker if you do it that way.
And actually another good thing you can do again, dry it out,
crunch it up and put it in your bird feeders.
Birds seem to really like it and the extra calcium does seem to actually help
them a bit. And so that's the way I personally like to use mine.
I just crunch it up and I throw it in my bird feeder and boom,
the cycle continues. Our final one is the humble banana.
Now bananas have a couple different things people will often recommend.
First of all, they say, okay, well bananas have tons of potassium in them.
And remember potassium is the K of N-P-K, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium,
one of the three main macronutrients that plants need to really put on Epic
growth. So it can't be a bad thing that we're adding potassium to the soil,
right? No, it actually can't be a bad thing. It's a good thing.
Generally speaking, the,
some of the resources on the internet are showing crazy high potassium numbers
for bananas that simply aren't true. 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 purpose of adding a lot of potassium,
you could just add an organic fertilizer that does have a high NPK ratio on the
K side, that high potassium.
Now I'm not trying to say don't bury this banana in the soil.
You certainly could. At least the banana peel, you want to eat the banana.
But what a lot of people will also do is they'll make a banana peel soak.
So they'll sort of soak this in water and then they say, okay,
well that's going to have a nice little tea effect and then watering that will
do something. It will do something to some degree.
The potassium can actually get into the water. It's, it's somewhat soluble,
but it's not going to make a really big impact. Again,
this feels like a tip that a lot of people have come up with simply because we
all eat a lot of bananas and there's a large amount of waste.
And we want to think of things to do with it and so we somehow treat it in a
more special category than we would any other type of organic matter. You know,
for me, what do I do with bananas? If I want to throw them in my worm bin,
I'll chop up the peel nice and fine,
so the surface area again is higher and my worms can break it down quicker.
Or I'll just throw it into my compost bin and let it break down and then I'll
work that into the soil. Now I could just bury the peel.
That's certainly a good idea.
I choose not to because I'm in a nice urban environment and there's a lot,
a lot of digger pests and I try to avoid that.
Now I know it kind of seems like I was raining on the parade a little bit of
some of these really popular hacks and tips and tricks.
But sometimes us humans in the garden,
we like to overcomplicate and it's a lot better to take a step back, analyze,
look at what something really is and just keep it simple. You know,
coffee grounds, compost them, throw them in your worm bin,
sprinkle them here and there. Don't get any more complex than that.
Banana peels pretty much just compost them. Throw them in your worm bin,
bury them if you really want to. And eggshells, you can crunch them up.
You can really, really blend them up and you're good to go.
Maybe throw them in your bird 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 actually find to be really effective that I didn't
mention about these, drop it in the comments and until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.