good morning Welcome to our Homestead and Welcome to our Greenhouse we're going to be
talking about kitchen scraps we're going to be talking about the most common ones
everybody uses and how effective they are in the garden we're going to talk
about some common methods of how to use them in the garden let's get going
[Music]
so hopefully all of us have these things available to us and I think most of us do even if you're not
an avid Gardener you're still going to have some scraps in the kitchen that you can use in your
garden and using them in the garden is extremely important for building soil fertility and helping
to feed the plants in additionally if we are gardening we're going to have scraps that we
can use from the plants that we're picking to put right back in the garden so you probably
already guessed that the three most common kitchen scraps everybody tries to use in their Garden or
everybody hears about are coffee grounds eggshells and banana peels and I have some of these with me
this morning and we're going to talk about some Miss on what some of these will do and some of
them won't do but yes over time all of them are extremely beneficial for your soil but it's the
amount in which you're able to put in your soil and the form in which you're able to put it in
your soil that makes a difference but let's talk about the most common one that everybody always
thinks about using in the garden and that's the coffee grounds and using them to acidify soil so
if you're trying to use those coffee grounds to acidify the soil it's going to take an extremely
long period of time to do so why because the grounds themselves are not that acidic the pH
of the coffee grounds themselves are anywhere between 6.5 and 6.8 which is acidic but it's
just below neutral most of that acidity comes out of the grounds when you make the cup of coffee so
utilizing those grounds on your plants it's going to take a very long period of Time for That soil
to acidify you're much better using sulfur or this and that's a lemon lemons are incredibly
acidic especially the Rind of the lemon so if you don't have any of the juice left on the inside
which more than likely you're not you're going to be using that on the inside most of us just have
the peels left those peels can be around 4.5 in PH which is extremely acidic so adding those to
the soil is going to help your blueberry plants out even more much more than the coffee grounds
and when I talk about the methods of how to use these things I'll talk about the best method for
this lemon too in addition to its acidity citrus peels contain a lot of magnesium calcium and
nitrogen but in addition to that it contains a lot of sulfur which contributes to that acidity let's
talk about one of the other very common ones and that is eggshells so do eggshells contain a lot
of calcium absolutely is calcium good for your garden and necessary absolutely however getting
that calcium in the soil and bioavailable for your garden takes an extremely long time down here are
some eggshells that I had crushed up and put in my compost pile over a year ago that compost was
added to the garden and as you can see it hasn't broken down that much even over the last year
so if you want these eggshells to be bioavailable quicker for your garden you really need to
completely dry them out and crush them into a really fine powder and that's going to give the
microbes in your soil a leg up on breaking them down but if you're trying to add these eggshells
next to a tomato plant that say has Blossom and rot which needs calcium to cure it's just not
going to work it would work over time to help add calcium to the soil but your Tomatoes two
years from now are going to benefit that all right let's talk about the ubiquitous banana peel banana
peels are known for potassium and that is very true the peel actually contains 42 percent of the
potassium for the entire banana and if you've ever left these on your counter you know how
quickly they break down into the soil so adding these to the soil in any form actually is going
to add a decent amount of potassium for your soil around your plants apples everybody loves apples
and this is a very common kitchen scrap well apples do contain a lot of nitrogen but what
a lot of people don't know is the seeds contain a lot of phosphorus but if you think about it
adding those to the soil adding those seeds they're going to take an incredibly long time
to break down and how many seeds do you get in an apple you'd have to have a ton of apple seeds to
add the amount of phosphorus that you would need to really heal and rejuvenate your soil quickly or
a plant that's sick that needs phosphorus you just can't do it with throwing an apple in the garden
and then of course there are greens this is some Swiss chard leaves that weren't the best to eat
those are going to add a lot of nitrogen into your garden as well and these you can chop and drop and
that's what I want to talk about next is methods for adding these to the Garden so of course chop
and drop is one of them and it works really well with Greenery that Greenery does lay on the top
of the soil kind of creates a mulch but it also does add a decent amount of nitrogen to the area
but not the amount you're thinking of dropping these right next to a plant is not going to
instantly green up the other plant that's struggling so while I do recommend chopping
and dropping in certain situations especially for that mulching it's just not going to add that much
to the soil immediately like we all need before I talk about those other methods I do want to say
also that adding One Singular thing to solve a problem is probably not going to do it like
with the example of adding eggshells for calcium or just Greenery for nitrogen there's probably
other things that the plants are lacking that they need as well and just adding your standard
NPK that all these fertilizers at the store have in them your nitrogen phosphorus and potassium
it they're lacking so your plants need Boron they need sodium they need magnesium they need
sulfur and these other elements help your plant to actually take up and convert other nutrients like
the mpk and they all work in concert together so while adding something like a nitrogen fertilizer
will green your plant up really quickly it's only doing that it's not helping with anything else so
what can we do well the other two methods are going to be much more effective and the first
one is composting when you are composting all those things together the microbes in
the soil the worms all of the microbiology is helping to break all this down together and mix
it up into a form that's not only bioavailable for your plants but it's all mixed together so
everything is there that your plant is going to need so I would say the number one method
to be able to add your scraps to your garden is to come post them first now we know this takes
a long period of time but it's highly beneficial and there are quick composting methods out there
that you can try if you want so let me show you another pretty solid way to use these kitchen
scraps and that is to take them into your garden or in your greenhouse and kind of dig this trench
by where you anticipate growing something next and what we're going to do with them
is we're just going to bury them in that Trench so burying kitchen scraps is a method of composting
and that is feeding the soil that's feeding the microbiology in the soil near where your plants
are going to grow this method may be a little bit quicker than the compost pile but you don't
have a huge wide variety of diversity as in the regular compost pile so it's an awesome method
and I do recommend it so here's the last method I'm going to talk about and that is drying your
kitchen scraps beforehand and then grinding and mixing them up now this method Works especially
well with the eggshells and I believe I mentioned that before if you dry out your eggshells and you
crush them up into a fine powder it's going to be more bioavailable quicker to the microbes in
the soil and then hence to the plants so check this out these are dried kitchen scraps that are
ground up and you can see how well it's broken down so far but there's no composting that has
happened yet in this because the moisture is gone and there are no microbes or soil biology working
on this this is a great food for your garden if mixed into the top layer of soil all you need is a
little bit of moisture and then that microbiology will start to work on it very very quickly so how
do you do this well there's a lot of different ways and you can just put these things in a
dehydrator and then kind of crush them up yourself in some fashion my wife actually shout out to her
she got me a piece of equipment that goes in the kitchen it's a kitchen composter and I didn't even
have a clue it was for my birthday I didn't have a clue I didn't ask for it and she surprised me
with it and I was a little skeptical at first but boy does it make some amazing stuff for
the garden now it's not necessary that you have that piece of equipment to do this you can do
it the old-fashioned way like I just said you can dry it out in the oven even and then crush
it up by hand but if you're interested I will leave a link to that piece of equipment in the
description below and if you use it and like it give a shout out to her in the comments section
below if you found that information helpful let me know in the comment section below or
of course if you have any questions also leave them for me in the comments section below now
I want you to go check out this video right here which shows you how to Trellis and prune
cucumbers for a huge yield have a beautiful blessed day we'll see you next time bye
thank you