How to Use Eggshells, Banana Peels, and Coffee Grounds in the Garden

In gardening, there are many over-complications of what should be a simple practice, and using kitchen scraps is a prime culprit! Today we look at three popular sources of kitchen waste - coffee grounds for plants, eggshells, and banana peels, and discuss the best way to use them in your garden.

IN THIS VIDEO

SUPPORT EPIC GARDENING

LEARN MORE

The video has a Spanish dub by Unilingo.

DISCLAIMER

[epicgardening]

Drop some comments on how you use these three kitchen scraps!

[mrchrisliddell]

I put all three in a blender, then water that "smoothie" into the soil, and it seems to work wonders on my plants!

[yeseniaportillo]

what to use coffee grounds for: 2:33
what to use egg shells for: 4:55
what to use banana peels for 7:14

[GeckoHiker]

I dehydrate my banana peels and use an old blender to powder them. Same with eggshells. At the end of the growing season I sprinkle the powders, add all the compost, then cover with leaf mulch and straw saved from the hen house. In the spring I can plant directly into the straw. This is my no-till method.

[chrisinmarin]

Loved “it’s just gardening guys”. You’re so right, we humans do try to over complicate things. Keep on growing!

[LARKXHIN]

If a snail crawls over coffee grounds, do they go a little faster? 🤔

[bridgetalbers]

to summarize: be lazy and just throw them in the compost! Perfect, this is exactly what I have been doing!

[mommak]

Grew up with a coffee can on our counter, egg shells and coffee grinds, banana peels went into it. Every weekend we just grabbed the can mixed it up by hand and sprinkled in the garden.my great Nona and pap came here in 1920, our family has been doing it since then. My pap had wonderful gardens.

[Pp-nu]

I love the way you explain things in layman's terms! Not everybody is an expert!

[brooklync]

I get a ton of egg shells from local, family-run bakeries. Kind of the same idea with getting coffee grounds from coffee shops. Plus, you get more connections with people in your community. Nice way to get such a valuable calcium source for free.

[Matt-ecpu]

If you want more coffee grounds for garden or compost bin, starbucks bags their used coffee grounds and gives it away to gardeners for free. Just go to your local starbucks and ask an employee about it.

[bbb-feqh]

It is great for the garden to combine the oven dried crushed eggshells to coffee grounds. The nutrients released are similar to diatomaceous earth and very beneficial for the soil. With banana peels, we have Staghorn and Elkhorn ferns and they almost devour the banana peels and I have just started sticking one or two banana peels on a tree trunk as the butterflies love feeding on them too.

[lynnthomas]

Really like how you have used such a small space to turn it into a beautiful garden area, inspirational

[echols]

I boil my egg shells with a little bit of vinegar. It helps to break down the calcium and minerals in the shells. Then I add both the water and the shells to my garden

[mountaingran]

I bake my egg shells and then grind them in a coffee grinder that I purchased at a thrift shop for that purpose. I then scatter them in my garden or add them to the chickens’ feed. The added calcium helps the hens to lay eggs with stronger shells. The coffee grounds and banana peels go directly into my kitchen compost bin.

[Annie-gouu]

Love your shirt!! I used to work for Jim on his worm farm. Incredible operation, let me tell you. Tractor bucket after tractor bucket full of worms all day every day. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of worms. Gently harvested from (enormous) bed surfaces by pitchfork into the bucket, then into a big ol spinning screen cylinder that dumps the sifted bedding below and the worms come out the end into 1/2 50 gallon drums cut lengthwise, and then the drums are laid out alongside eachother on tables in the sun. The worms dig an inch into the dirt to escape the sun, and you go barrel to barrel scraping off the top inch of soil and throwing it into a tractor bucket to be thrown back on the beds. By the time you scrape each one the worms have buried themselves again and you do it until the dirt is all gone and you have nothing but 60lbs of straight up spaghetti. Then there are more empty 1/2 drums prepared with a shallow bed of fresh, wet peat moss, and each bed gets 20 lbs of worms. They’re cumulatively stored during the days harvest in a large, cooled trailer fitted with wooden makeshift rack systems for the worms. When 1pm comes the sun is south central florida is too direct and powerful to sun-sort anymore without killing the worms so harvesting stops and manpower is diverted to packaging and order fulfillment. We’d make 400-1000 bags of worms, shipping boxes and tape labels to them all, load a trailer with a AC wall unit and gas generator rigged to it for the 45 mile drive to the post office…. Where one or two of us would unload and count and scan every single box and stack half a dozen pallets with live product…all while covered head to toe in stinking worm shit! LOL
Jim is one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life. He is an awe inspiring soldier of Christ who proclaims the gospel boldly and gives God credit for all things. He has a wonderful family that loves and respects him. He conducts his business on his own personal property and has made every single piece of infrastructure on that MASSIVE farm himself.
My time spent working there was an incredible period in my life, both in and out of work. My faith became profound and God revealed Himself to me daily- and boy did I learn a LOT!
Thanks for the video, and thanks for being God’s vessel this morning to remind me of such a wonderful time. To God be the glory!

[marlonb.]

Coffee grounds have never killed any plant I've grown or now have. I've learned how to garden since I was 8, and now I'm 59.

[txspacemom]

My dad just dug a hole in the garden during the cooler months, and covered it up. He did this day after day, in rows, up and down his garden beds. Come Spring, he tilled it all together and had great soil. He then started over in the corner, down in between the rows of vegetables, all growing season, tilled everything under at the end of the season. He kept it simple and we had great food!

[c.d.]

During the winter, I've been putting my coffee grounds around my blueberry bushes, to give the soil a little kick of acidity. Besides, the blueberry plants are closer to my house than the compost bin, so less snow to trudge through.

[southernsproutsfarm]

I tried the “banana tea” on all my tomato plants except 3 and you can definitely see a major difference in the plants! I am planning on trying it out on some others to see if it seems to help.