Worm castings are a great natural fertilizer that not only add plant-available nutrients, but also increase long-term soil structure and health. But at over $20 a cubic foot, worm castings can be expensive to add to your garden. So don’t buy them, make your own flow through worm bin and easily harvest your own worm castings. This video shows the materials and tools necessary and gives simple-to-follow instructions on how to go about building your own flow through worm bin. It even shows some examples of bins of different sizes made from different materials to give you an idea of what else you can do to better suit your needs and use what you have available to you to cut cost while still getting great results from your garden.
Bananas are an awesome food. They taste great, help with muscular recovery, and come packaged in fertilizer. That peel that your banana comes in is itself food, for your garden. If you have a compost pile you are probably already adding your kitchen waste, but if you are like most people you slack on taking it out if it’s cold, or wet, or late, and so forth. But after looking at some of the benefits banana peels provide to your garden you might be a little more willing to make an effort to be strict in your peel collection for your compost and garden.
Potassium
Topping the list of nutrient benefits found in banana peels is potassium. Potassium in one of the “big three” nutrients plants need most. It is necessary for good root health and strong cell walls. Having healthy potassium levels in your soil will allow your plants to become more resistant to drought, disease, and pests.
Phosphorus
Next on the list of nutrients banana peels offer is another one of the “big three”, phosphorus. Phosphorus is one of the nutrients your plants need for production of your food. Plants use phosphorus in growing new shoots, fruit, and seeds. Like potassium, it also contributes to root health and therefore overall plant health.
Calcium
Banana peels also contain calcium. Calcium is necessary for plants to transfer other nutrients throughout the plant body. If your soil is deficient in calcium your plants will not even be able to benefit from the nutrients that your soil does have.
Magnesium
Last, but certainly not least, is magnesium. Magnesium is used by plants in the production of chlorophyll which makes photosynthesis possible. Without magnesium plants would not be able to get their energy from the sun, effectively starving them.
Few foods come packaged in such beneficial fertilizer. Don’t let any of it go to waste, whether you apply your peels directly to the garden or put them in your compost, make sure your plants aren’t missing out on all of these beneficial nutrients.
This time of year many of us are going to have a layer of leaves all over the lawn. Many people simply rake and bag them to put on the street for the trash men to pick up, others will even pay someone else to do this. But there are more options for what to do with this fantastic free garden resource.
Fall Mulch
Mulching with leaves can have a drastic impact on your garden’s soil mineral content. Not only do the leaves of many deciduous trees have an NPK of around .5, .1, .5, but they also have calcium, magnesium, and other minerals drawn deep from underground by the trees roots. Along with providing a slow release fertilizer for your garden a thick layer of leaf mulch applied in the fall or winter will insulate your soil, providing a more hospitable environment for earthworms which will feed on the leaves all winter.
Leaf Mold or Compost
Leaves can also be bagged and kept for leaf mold. Leaf mold can help aerate clay soil or help water retention in sandy soil. But it will take years to make and not everyone has the space or the patience for that. Some of the benefits can still be had simply by adding the leaves to your compost pile.
Spring Mulch
If you do bag your leaves for leaf mulch only to find that you don’t have the space to store the bags, or that you are just not patient enough to wait 2 years for the results all is not lost. You can take the partially broken down leaf mold which will still resemble its original state, and apply it as a thick layer of mulch in spring or summer. It will not heat up the way grass clipping do, and leaf mold, even partial leaf mold, can hold up to 3 times it’s weight in water, reducing your need to irrigate or hand water, and keeping your crops happy in warm weather.
This year, don’t waste your time and energy to just throw away a free resource that could have powerful benefits for your garden.
Composting is something that every homesteader should do. It allows you to recycle food and other material and to create richer soil at the same time. However, there are only some items that you should not add to the compost pile. Let’s look at some of the elements that you should not add to the compost pile, as well as the reasons why.
Never put any meat scraps into the compost pile. The same goes for bones. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it has the potential to attract vermin. In addition, it is going to cause the compost pile to stink. Never put waste from carnivorous animals onto the compost pile either. You can put on regular manure, but you should never put anything from a carnivorous animal – this goes for pets, such as your cats and dogs. The reason for this is simple – it has the potential to add parasites to the compost, which you would then end up putting in the garden and eating.
Do not put any wood that has been chemically treated into the compost pile either. There is a good chance that the chemicals will get into the compost. Do not place walnut shells into the compost pile either. It contains a chemical that can be toxic to certain plants.
Never put oil or grease into the compost pile. It will not break down, and it can cover the other items in the pile, which means they will not break down either. You should not put any weeds in the compost pile, especially if they have seeds. If you do, you are just going to end up with weeds in the garden.
Keep composting, but make sure you know exactly what is going into compost pile each day.
Coffee grounds are a common cheap and easy form of organic material to add to your compost pile or garden. Here are a few tips for how, and why, to use them in your garden.
Coffee and pH
Despite what you might have heard, coffee grounds in your garden will have little to no effect of your soil pH and will not harm plants even when applied directly as a top dressing in generous amounts. The acid that is in the coffee you drink is there because it is water-soluble, meaning that is has been removed from the coffee grounds by the water that was used to brew your coffee. The spent grounds themselves will have a near-neutral pH of 6.5 to 6.8.
That being said, there is quite a bit in coffee grounds that will have an effect on the soil in your garden. Coffee grounds have an average NPK of 2.1, 0.3, 0.3. And the Phosphorus and Potassium are plants available right away, while the Nitrogen will not be available until broken down by micro-organisms and worms that will be attracted to the garden by the grounds. There is also Magnesium, Copper, Calcium, Manganese, Iron, and Zinc in coffee grounds. All of which provide food for your plants and for soil life that contributes to the health of your garden. For those that still can’t get over the fear of applying coffee grounds directly to your garden soil, there is always the compost pile.
Compost
Coffee grounds will heat up a compost pile quickly which can help keep the necessary organisms alive as we head into the fall and winter months. And worms love coffee grounds. Like chickens, worms have gizzards and have no teeth to break down their food. The coarse texture of the grounds and their small size are great for this.
Availability
But perhaps the best thing about coffee grounds is that they are available in most places, and in bulk, for free. Coffee shops are just going to throw them away, and often times they have separate trash cans that only contain coffee grounds and coffee filters (which are also great in the garden or compost pile). So even if you don’t drink coffee yourself, stop by a coffee shop today and get your garden a boost.
When it comes to a thriving, healthy garden, one of the quintessential components is a good fertilizer, and homemade compost is one the best things you can make. Using kitchen scraps, garden cuttings and locally sourced organic waste like grass clippings, manure, coffee grounds, egg shells, etc., you can-and should-make your own compost pile for a consistent supply of amazing plant superfood.
There are many different options for how to build a compost pile and what to build it with, so if you’re not already composting, you’ll want to start there.
But if you do already have a successful compost pile, compost tea is a fantastic way to use it to give your plants optimum nutrition, minerals, and beneficial microbes.
Compost tea is exactly what it sounds like-except it’s for plants to drink up, not humans! There are many different methods of brewing it, but it is essentially soaking some finished compost in water for a period of time, and then using the mixture to water your plants.
Obviously, you can just dig your compost into the soil, so why go to the extra effort of brewing a tea? Well, the way plants drink in nutrients is through water, the nutrients bond to water molecules and are absorbed into the roots of the plants, so it just makes it more readily available to them. Also, for certain issues like fungus or blight on the leaves of the plant, there might be benefit in certain cases to being able to spray the compost mixture right onto the plant directly (although you’ll only want to do this if you know it is specifically recommended, compost tea can burn the foliage of some plants).
To make compost tea, there are a lot of different options. Some people prefer to aerate it, with a water tank like the kind used in fish tanks, and others choose to simply let the tea mixture sit and stir once a day. But the basic principle is the same: you take a bucket or large drum, depending on your needs, and place some ready compost in it. You can make a sort-of tea bag, with something like a pillowcase, or just put it in there loose. After about a week or whenever you’d like to use it, you can either strain out the loose compost or simply pour over your plants.
Compost tea is an excellent way to get amazing nutrients and minerals to your plants, and way cheaper than Miracle Gro! Believe me, your plants will thank you-try some today!
[More] Organic Gardening Secrets – Grows Up To 10 Times The Plants. Learn More Here
Enjoy a quick video from Steve about Compost Teas and their amazing benefits for your garden…
