8 hours Ago By Sydney Evans
Gardening can be an expensive hobby and job to keep up with, especially with the arrival of spring. As bulbs begin to bloom, ensuring they’re getting the right nutrients as the season changes can require some extra care and attention. Keeping an eye on how much water your plants are getting is relatively straightforward, but maintaining the quality of the soil can be slightly more complicated (and costly).
While fertilisers and organic matter are readily available to buy and can help with this, there’s a much simpler and cost-effective way to support a healthy garden. Flower expert at Eflorist, David Denyer, has shared how food scraps can be used in the garden to transform flower beds into a “colourful” and “vibrant” space, saving you from unnecessary spending on fertilisers or plant food. David explained that “potassium, phosphorus, magnesium and calcium” are crucial nutrients for any healthy garden, supporting plants all the way “from root development to bud formation and petal strength".
Ensuring flowers get enough access to these during their growth and blooming phases can be easily achieved by using these four food scraps according to David, but it’s important to “avoid overloading the soil.” Instead, gardeners should “stick to small, occasional additions” which support the plant without “upsetting the balance of your garden’s soil health". These are the four kitchen leftovers that you should be using in your garden to support healthy blooms and how to use them.
Banana peel Banana peels provide a natural boost of potassium, supporting nutrient movement within the plant and helping improve water regulation. To use in your garden, David said: “Simply bake your banana peels at a low temperature for a few hours, then either blend or grind them into a fine powder.” Great for plants like dahlias, calendula or cosmos, when mixed into the soil, the powder steadily releases nutrients.
Tea leaves Instead of chucking used tea leaves, you can sprinkle the damp leaves directly onto the soil and “gently water them in". Containing small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, tea leaves can help lower the soil pH, making for a particularly vibrant flower bed. The lower pH makes it easier for certain plants like oses, hydrangeas, and azaleas to absorb nutrients, deepening their petal colour.
But David warned against using tea leaves that have been mixed with milk or sugar “as that can attract pests or lead to mould in your soil". Crushed eggshells Don’t make the mistake of adding these directly to soil. Instead, David said a better method is “to grind them into a fine powder and soak them in vinegar for 24 hours".
Crushed eggshells break down “far too slowly to make an impact” when directly applied to the soil. Soaking them in vinegar produces calcium acetate which plants absorb more easily, and can be poured around the base of plants once cooled, allowing them to soak up the calcium found in shells. This is especially useful for petunias and geraniums, which are repeat bloomers.
Dried pulses or lentils When it comes to rinsing dried pulses or lentils, instead of letting the water wash down the drain, save this and use it in your garden. This water “contains natural starches and minerals from the legumes, which feed the helpful microbes in your soil". Pouring the water onto your plants the same day you collect it provides soil with a nutrient-rich drink full of phosphorus and potassium that plants need to stay healthy.
.
