12 hours Ago By Katherine McPhillips
I love growing hydrangeas that are pretty low maintenance and do not need a lot of care unlike fussier flowers in my garden, but I realised there is a simple way to help them bloom. Hydrangeas should be fertilised in April as the weather has warmed up and they will have just begun growing again after going dormant during the wintertime. This means if you want to kick start their growth and help them support new buds, then you will need to feed them plenty of potassium, a key nutrient for plants that helps flower development.
I try to be careful about what I am using in my garden as I have a dog who loves burying his toys underneath my flowerbeds, but I have discovered a natural way to feed hydrangeas that will help them become bursting with flowers. After looking online, I discovered a popular gardening solution is to make a fertiliser out of used-up banana peels, which is meant to be incredibly good for plants. Bananas obviously contain lots of potassium but they also contain the nutrient phosphorus, which is needed for roots to grow and helps the formation of flower buds.
This is an organic feed which will help improve the fertility of the soil and has no chemicals so you can use it in your garden without worrying about harming your pets. I am using it on my hydrangeas but it will work to boost any flowering plants and even crops in your garden that need more support in springtime like tomatoes, strawberries or peppers. To begin, you will need a mason jar and a used-up banana peel.
You only need one or two banana peels per hydrangea, as you do not want to risk overfertilising the soil. I read online that natural fertilisers are more potent than the ones you buy from the store and you can risk oversaturating the soil and overwhelming the plant if you add too much. I simply took a banana peel I had eaten for breakfast that morning and used a pair of scissors to chop it up.
It is better to cut up the peel as the nutrients will be released at a quicker rate. I then placed the banana peels in the jar and added water from the tap until the jar was completely filled up. I screwed on the lid and placed the jar in a cupboard for 24 hours.
It is important to let the banana peels soak for a day as the nutrients will then leech into the water. Simply placing the banana peels on top of the soil will take weeks or even months for them to break down and release the nutrients, so it is more practical to use the water. The next day, I waited until late afternoon and stained the banana peel pieces out of the now cloudy water.
I took the jar outside and poured the banana peel fertiliser into a bucket and also filled it up with clean water. The bucket was roughly one part banana tea and two parts water. I did this so the nutrients would spread more evenly around the soil just to be certain there was no chance of overfertilisation.
Then, I poured the banana water around the base of my hydrangea plant. Overall, this simple gardening trick took only 10 minutes, so it is a quick way to help your plants. You only need to do this once in April to help give the hydrangea plant a boost, so hopefully, I will be rewarded with bigger and more colourful flowers in the next few weeks.
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