Emily Chan
Fertilizing your plants is one of the best things you can do for your garden. Proper fertilization leads to stronger plant growth, producing more plentiful crops, bigger and brighter blooms, and just happier plants in general.
A good-quality fertilizer that you can just pick up from the store is expensive. Luckily for you, it’s possible to make your own fertilizer that’s free of cost!
If you’re tossing away your food scraps into the garbage bin, you’re losing ample amounts of nutrients that would be beneficial for your garden.
Making natural fertilizer not only saves you money and gives your plants food, but it also is great for the environment. In the United States, 119 billion pounds of food is wasted each year. That’s a lot!
So when your grocery items go bad, don’t just discard them in the trash and contribute to the food waste statistics. Instead, add them to your homemade fertilizer. Here’s how you can get started.
Potassium, phosphorous, nitrogen, and calcium are what help plants prosper. Some common household ingredients to include in your fertilizer are eggshells, coffee grounds, and banana peels. You can also use stuff found outside around your yard, like leaves from trees and grass clippings.
Eggshells are rich in calcium. To turn them into fertilizer, set the shells in the sun to let them dry out. This ensures that any harmful bacteria will be killed. Then, crush them up into bits and pieces and sprinkle them into the soil of your garden.
Coffee grounds contain nitrogen and can also be used as a natural fertilizer. Like the eggshells, you’ll want to dry them out in the sun before applying them to the soil. Afterward, bury them in the ground.
Next, food scraps like banana peels, apple cores, and citrus rinds help promote root growth. Before adding them to the dirt, dry them out or boil them in water, then mash them up.
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