★ How to Make Banana Peel Fertiliser (A Complete Step by Step Guide)

In today's Project Diary, I will show you how to make a really great fertilizer from leftover banana skins. Hi guys and welcome to Project Diaries. Today I want to teach you about using bananas in the garden. Now hopefully you've already seen how I use bananas to ripen tomatoes using ethylene gas that they produce, but you can also use the skins in the garden. Now unlike lots of fake news that's going around about bananas being toxic and bad for your health, they're actually really good for your health. You can eat them at different stages. If you have them on the green or yellowy stage, they're actually really good for your digestive system and gut. They can also lower blood pressure. If you eat them later on, you see where they're going a bit black, you can eat them when they go completely black. The sugars start to develop more when they go to this black stage, which is amazing if you need more energy and just more sugar in your diet that's natural rather than fake refined sugars. Obviously that's still bad if you've got type 2 diabetes, so check your dietary facts before you start eating loads and loads of bananas. But I find bananas really helpful. But once you've eaten them, you just end up discarding the skin and you do nothing with it. But they're actually incredible for the garden. Now there's many ways that you can do this and I will show you all of them in this video. The first one is you can just bury it in the garden and let it rot down and release the nutrients really slowly, but there's a few ways that you can speed them up and here's how to do it. So another easy way of producing banana fertiliser is just get some water like this. Now I'm just doing this on a small scale today, but you can do this all the way up to 5 gallon buckets or anything bigger, it's completely up to you. Then all you need to do is just fill the bucket up or the glass up with as many banana skins that will fit in. If you wanted to, you can always cut the banana skins up into smaller pieces just so they fit more into the glass. Once it's completely full, you want to make sure the water level is just above the banana skin line. If it's not, the banana skin will start to turn mouldy and ruin this fertiliser completely, so make sure it is covered. Then just leave this out of direct sunlight for a week or two, but I will show you more about this later on. The third one and also my favourite, this is exactly how to make a slow releasing fertiliser. It can be the most time consuming one out of all of them, but it's really easy to make. All you need to do is make sure that the banana skins are really dried out and turn black. Fortunately, it's a really hot day today, so I'm going to place these on a metal baking tray. Then I'm going to leave them out in the sun all day. So fertilisers usually have an MPK rating. I will do another full video to explain MPK ratings, so don't forget to subscribe, but for today I'm just going to give you a quick rundown. MPK is just an abbreviation for Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. And as you can see, plants need these for a really good balance to stay healthy. So what benefits do banana skins have? Well unfortunately, they don't have any Nitrogen, but they can hold up to 25% Phosphorus and 42% Potassium. That means adding banana skin fertiliser to your plants will not only increase the flower blooms and fruit produce, they will also help promote a really strong root system and general plant health. Banana skins also contain other nutrients such as Calcium, Manganese, Magnesium, Sodium and Sulfur. One last tip, you just want to make sure that all the banana labels have been taken off because it may have some harmful glue on them. Then just leave them out in direct sunlight to dry out for an entire day. So here they are 8 hours later and I'm just going to test to see if they're crispy enough. If you can hear them crack and they snap really easily, they're definitely dry. But if they're bendy like this one, it means there's still too much water in them and they're not ready to use. This one here is perfect and it sounds great, but there are a couple that are still not dry enough and as there's no heat left in the day, I'm going to have to put these in the oven for a couple of hours just to dry them out. So I've just put these at the bottom of the oven while I've done Grandad's dinner. You don't want to make the oven too hot, the idea is just to dry these out and not burn them. So you want to keep the oven around 100 to 150 degrees and no more. Burning them can kill off a lot of the nutrients and turn these into charcoal which still can be beneficial but not as good as banana skins. So the next thing you want to do is grind it up into a fine powder. This will give you a lot better surface area and help it break down a lot quicker when you add it to your plant soil. Now you can use a coffee grinder or a blender to do this, but I don't like using electricity if I don't have to, so I'm using a pestle and mortar today. This will also give my shoulder a bit of a workout, so it's beneficial all round. Just take your time, I find this really therapeutic, but you just want to make it as a fine a powder as possible. You may find that the tips of the bananas are a little bit too fibrous and they won't break down into a powder, so just discard those and put those into your compost pile if needed. If you want to try and make compost at home but you don't feel confident enough, check out this video link on the screen now and this will give you all the do's and don'ts before trying. Making your own compost at home is a fantastic use to feed your entire garden and it also uses up lots of kitchen scraps to stop them going into landfill. I think I've ground this up as fine as I can, so I'm just going to give you a close up. Now there's many a way you can add this to your garden. You can add it straight to the soil, you can dig it into the top part of your soil or you can add a few tablespoons into a potting hole before transplanting your plant. Now you can store this however you want, I'm going to use a jar today. Now you just want to make sure that this is stored in a really dry place. If there's any moisture left in it, it may cause fungus to grow and it could spoil all your hard work. Another little trick if you haven't got a steady hand is to use my little plastic trowel. If you want to learn how to make this and five other handy garden tools, check out the link on the screen now. All you need to do is carefully pour it into the trowel, get your jam jar or container and simply pour it in this way with no mess at all. Then just do this throughout the year as you eat more bananas. It's also been researched that if you drink one heaped teaspoon of this in warm water like a tea, it can help with insomnia, fatigue, high blood pressure, diabetes and even Parkinson's. Now this is a slow releasing fertiliser, so you do want to add it to your soil around three to six months before your growing season. Quickly going back to my banana tea, now this has been here for about a week. Now as you can see the water has evaporated, so you do need to keep an eye on this and top it up whenever it gets low. But once you've done that, you just need to dilute it with water, five parts water to one part fertiliser. Then just water your plants how you would normally. Hopefully you've enjoyed today's video on how to use banana skins in the garden. I use these all the time and they're incredible, but I will do another video on how to apply them and quantities, so don't forget to subscribe and click the bell button for future notifications. And if you've enjoyed this video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up and I'll see you again next time. Take care. If you'd like to keep up to date on all of my future releases, click the subscribe button here. Here are some links to some of my other videos. And if you've tried this or any other project, I'd love to see your progress, so please join my Facebook gardening group where thousands of people are sharing photos and ideas daily. Thanks for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye.