From the kitchen to the compost pile

IT’S not that difficult to get your garden growing and flourishing. You can actually do so with items from your pantry or that you discard from your kitchen.

Granny Mouse Country House & Spa shares these tips:

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1. Use leftover ground coffee to attract earthworms. Sprinkling this onto your soil will help make your soil healthy and more fertile and tomatoes sweeter. It’s a great plant booster due to its calcium, potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus content.
2. Baking soda, due to its alkalinity, which flowers thrive on, is also great for your garden. It creates a hostile environment, which makes it difficult for fungi to grow. Stir a teaspoon of baking soda into a litre of water, and spray the leaves of your fungus-prone plants.
3. Vinegar is a non-toxic solution for killing algae and is safe for plants. Simply mix three parts water and one part vinegar, and spray. This helps to remove unsightly green growth and it is also effective in killing mould, weeds and other fungi. Vinegar is acidic and achieves the same results as chlorine without the negative side effects.
4. Chop up banana peels and bury them in the soil when you plant tomatoes, rosebushes, or green pepper plants. The phosphorous content in the peels will enrich the soil and strengthen your plants.

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5. Tea can also do wonders to improve the vibrancy of your plants. If you already have a compost pile, there’s a benefit to taking the time to brew it into a liquid solution bursting with beneficial micro-organisms. Just don’t add sugar to the mix.
6. Soda water can be more nutritious to plants than plain tap water because it contains carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorous, potassium, sulphur and sodium, all of which are beneficial for plants. Let the fizzy water go flat before pouring.
7. Egg shells, due to their rich calcium content, can help plants like tomatoes, which are often plagued by a calcium deficiency. Rinse them, crush them, and add them to plants or start seedlings in eggshells that have been carefully halved and rinsed. When the seedlings are big enough to be transplanted, plant them right in the ground, shell and all; the shell will biodegrade over time.

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