Fertilizer can be pricy. I love my summer garden but decided this year I would try and nourish my garden naturally with garbage discards I already had on hand and save both money and the planet.
First, I save all my eggshells and toss them in the oven briefly to dry them out. Once cooled, I crush them and place them in a freezer bag until I have a good amount. Then I grind them in my spice blnder until they are a fine power, mix with water and use freely in my garden to bump up the calcium levels.
I have saved all my coffee grounds for the last month. For me, this means I need to do a bit of work since I use small metal coffee pods, a splurge for sure. The used pods I recycle of course, but now I extract the used grounds first. Once my old sauerkraut jar is full, I mix with water, place it in the blender to further break down the grounds and pour the mix into my garden. This is an excellent way to improve blooms and fruit output because it improves the nitrogen in the soil. Coffee grounds are also great for some flowering plants like azaleas.
I also keep all my fruit and vegetable peels; banana, apple, potato, what have you, and I blend them in the blender with plenty of water to mix into the soil to further enrich the dirt. I do the same with some stems and root ends from cutting up vegetables. One of the perks of this is that I can simply toss everything into a freezer bag and process all of this when I have the time. I also use any leftover root vegetable bits and stems for my stock and thus never have any leftovers that way.
If any of this sounds labor intensive, it honestly is not. I simply toss everything into a couple of dedicated freezer bags and only process what I have when I have the time. Usually this happens when I am already in the kitchen doing other tasks. It is simple to add these tasks in when I am already working in the kitchen thus saving time and effort.
Thus far, the amount of trash I am throwing away has been significantly reduced and my garden is thriving and all for the cost of something from nothing.
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the house behind 