Inside: Buying fertilizer from the store can be expensive and who knows what’s in that bag you purchased from the garden center, anyway. We’ve made it simple with our compost 101 and cheap organic fertilizers post. Read on to find out how.
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If you’ve been stopping by this blog for a while now, you know I lean toward the unconventional and practical when it comes to gifts. I received this compost bin as a present for Mother’s Day, and I’m really liking it! (Amazon carries a similar compost bin for the home gardener.) Previously I’ve simply put compost on a pile or dug a hole–still good options, mind you. But confining kitchen scraps, weeds, spent flowers, grass clippings, and yard waste into a bin makes the most beautiful dark soil–cheap but valuable food for your garden. Filet mignon for your plants.
Compost 101
If you are new to composting, it’s probably quicker to mention what not to include in the kitchen compost bucket—meat, dairy products, eggs (the part inside the shells, obviously). All your other food scraps are welcome in the bucket, including coffee grounds and tea bags—minus any staples on the bags. The tea bags and coffee filters go right into the mix, so you don’t have to sort those out.
Since receiving the composter, I put fruit and veggie scraps, eggshells, cofffee grounds with filters, weeds, leaves, and grass clippings inside and give the ingredients in my compost potpourri a turn about once a week. I also add in some water about that often. Works like a charm.
But I’m also fond of another simple method–trench composting. Dig a hole between plants that’s big enough to accommodate your compost from the kitchen bucket, leaving a little room so that it’s buried under a layer of some of the dirt you removed. Then wait for your garbage gold to feed your plants.
A simpler method is tucking bits of scraps underneath your mulch, but I’ve not tried this. You do run the risk of pets or varmints retrieving the compost, whether digging up the hole or tearing up the mulch to get to the food.
Weeds
As I’ve mentioned before, weeds can be useful to the home garden. You can add them to your compost, provided they haven’t gone to seed. Note: Some gardeners say that if your compost gets hot enough the seeds will be destroyed. But I’d rather err on the side of caution by leaving them out. Besides, my compost pile doesn’t get that hot.
But my new favorite way to handle the weeds is to make a tea. Now let me be the first to tell you it will smell bad and attract flies after a while. And when I say after a while, I mean about a week or so into the process. Interestingly for me, I kept waiting for this horrendous odor, and it ended up smelling like the milk barn used to on very hot days. So it was oddly comforting, as I miss milking cows and miss my milking partner. You’d understand if you ever worked the underside of a Holstein.
Back to the weed tea. Here is what you’ll need:
- A standard 5-gallon bucket
- Water
- Weeds
- A stick for stirring if you’re in it for the long haul
Fill the 5-gallon bucket with weeds–nettles, horsetail, chickweed, to name a few–and cover with water. Stir once a week for three to five weeks. When the fertilizer has thickened into a gooey substance, you can use it by mixing the liquid at a 1:10 ratio. Or, more simply, add some of the liquid fertilizer to water in your watering can until it looks like a weak tea.
Eggshells
I found this on Pinterest last year. The idea comes from Tiffany McCauley’s website The Flavor of Healthy Living, and I love the story of her grandmother’s egg pitcher. Worth visiting for that alone. The long and the short of it is to simply put your eggshells in a pitcher of water whenever you make eggs—crush them down to fit more inside. This, too, will smell after a while, though for some reason mine didn’t have a strong odor. It could be because I didn’t add enough eggshells. As you use it up, she says you can keep adding water to the same shells, but when the water fails to stink, you’ll need to dump the old shells out and start over.
What are the results?
Whenever I’ve used any of these homemade fertilizers, I’ve noticed the boost a week or two later, so patience is needed. I happened to use the contents of the egg fertilizer on a large planter filled with squash, and the leaves perked up and turned a darker shade of green with some noticeable growth on the plants. The weed tea worked well on my strawberry bed. Right after renovating I applied my weed tea fertilizer and, again, I noticed the darker, more vibrant green leaves and healthy growth.
Try one of these fertilizers on your little piece of the good green Earth, and be patient. You’ll reap the rewards of healthy plants and not spend an arm and a leg to do it!
Do you make compost? Tell us about it in the comments.
Related posts:
Planting the Late Summer Garden
Unique Containers for Gardening