15 Easy Organic Fertilizers to make at Home and Grow AMAZING Edible Gardens

Hi everyone, welcome back to my garden. My name is Holly and today I am going to be talking about how you can make some easy, natural, organic fertilizers at home with ingredients that you may already have. It's important to feed your plants because they use up lots of the nutrients from the soil to then produce food and we want to produce lots more food so we do need to supplement that as the plants use it up. It's also really important to use organic fertilizers. Number one because we don't want to be eating harmful toxins and number two is because we don't want to be polluting our soils and killing off all the microbiology in the soil and all the beneficial insects and pollinators. So we want a healthy environment for our plants to grow, our beneficial insects and then that in turn will create healthy food for us to eat. There are a bunch of natural ingredients that we probably already have in our homes that you put in the compost or that get thrown out that with one extra step we can turn them into some fertilizers and feed our plants. There are also a few plants you can grow specifically in your garden to make natural fertilizers out of and I will talk more about those later on in the video so make sure you keep watching to find out what plants you can grow to sort of farm your own natural fertilizers. It's also a great way to reduce the waste in your home and get as much as you can out of everything before it gets composted or thrown out. There may be one or two extra steps that you can do to really get the most out of everything and I try and do that with everything in my home whether it's food or clothing and saving money you can have more money to spend on other things like plants. All right so let's head into the kitchen and I will show you a few ingredients that we can use to turn into some natural fertilizers to feed our plants and grow heaps more food. Let's go. Okay so here we are in the kitchen and I have a few ingredients that you may be using that we can turn into liquid fertilizers. So the first is rice water. So when you're cooking your rice that water that the rice has been cooked in which is a little bit cloudy it's full of starch and that can be used on your garden to feed your plants. So rice water contains small amounts of NPK which are essential for plant health which is nitrogen phosphorus and potassium. Those three are found in small amounts in the rice starch the water that's left over after you've cooked the rice. It is not very concentrated so you won't need to worry about over fertilizing you can use this on your plants. You can also water it down a little bit dilute it to get more to water your plants giving them a little boost of nutrition along the way. There's a few important things to remember for this though and that is don't use if you salt the water. So don't salt your water if you're cooking the rice and then you can use that on your plants because if you have salted the water that will be detrimental to your plants and you don't want to be feeding your plants salty water. So ditch the salt and then you can use the leftover water to feed your plants. The other thing that is important to remember is to let it fully cool down before you use it so you don't burn your delicate little plants especially if you're using it on houseplants they are extremely sassy. So this is great for houseplants or edible plants. So number two is again just like the rice is the leftover water from pasta so if you're cooking pasta in the water then you can use that to feed your plants and same thing no salts and let it cool down completely before watering your plants with it. If there isn't much water left over after cooking your pasta or your rice just add in some more water to dilute it and that will give you more to feed your plants. So other things that we have in the kitchen that we can turn into plant food. Number three is potato water. So again when you're cooking the potatoes keep the water that they've been cooked in as long as there's no salt in it and let it cool down and you can use that to feed your plants. Another one which you may not think about is the water left over when you boiled eggs. So when you're boiling eggs some of the nutrients come out of the eggshells and that water can then be used to feed your plants. Eggshells have a lot calcium and calcium is really beneficial for feeding your plants. The other thing is is if you tend to fry your eggs or use eggs in baking rather than boiling them then just keep your leftover eggshells and you can boil these in water to release some of the nutrients. There's lots of leftover egg in the shell and also some will come off the shell as they are boiled and then keep the shells because the shells are also really great to use in the garden. So you can crush up the shells. I like to do it in my mortar and pestle. Crush them up a bit and then sprinkle them around your young seedlings and this can help deter slugs and snails because they don't like what is it? Creeping? Crawling over their sharp eggshells. So it doesn't always work but it is another layer that you can add to your garden as part of your pest management system. It also feeds your soil so you can put some of it back into your soil and it will replenish some of the calcium that has been drawn up by the plants. Sort of like a slow release fertilizer as it slowly breaks down in the garden. You can also chuck it in the compost and it will have the same effect of slowly releasing some of that calcium into the soil. Calcium is really good for tomato plants and it can help stop some blossom end rot so it is great to put those eggshells back in the garden and just this extra step of boiling in the water gets you a liquid fertilizer plus you still have the eggshells to crush for pest management and extra calcium for the soil. So you really are getting the most out of that ingredient for your garden. So another one, number five, is the leftover water from boiling vegetables. So when you have boiled or steamed your broccoli, your cauliflower, anything like that, you can use that water to then put on your plants and that will have some of those vitamins and nutrients left over in the water. Just definitely a tip though, if you are using any sort of brassica like broccoli or cabbage or anything like that, use that water outside because it will smell very strongly and you don't want your house ending up smelling like farts if you use that water on your house plants. I don't think your partner or flatmates would be too pleased with you if you did that. Definitely use that on outdoor plants to stop that funky smell. Another good one which you might have seen around is banana peels. This one is quite commonly used as a plant fertilizer because it is really high in potassium and great for your plants. So many of us have bananas at home and you know, what do you do with the leftover peels? Just chuck them in the compost but there are a few steps that you can do in between to really maximize the nutrition that you can get out of the banana and feed your plants. Potassium is essential for plant growth and health and here in Perth our soils are really sandy and potassium can leach away therefore we need to be able to put some potassium back into the soil. Also the fruiting plants like you know your capsicums, your fruit trees, things like that, they use up a lot of that potassium so we do need to continue to put that back into our soils. Potassium helps strengthen your plants eggs and cell growth and also flowering and fruiting so it is a really good one to use on your fruit trees to promote more flowers, strong plants and delicious abundant fruit yields which is exactly what we want. We want to grow lots of fruit, lots of delicious healthy food and fruit so adding that potassium back into the soil is really going to help us with that. So there are a few different ways that you can use bananas in your garden and that sort of depends on the level of effort you feel like putting in at the time when you've peeled the banana. So sometimes if I cannot be bothered I will just chuck the banana peel straight in the compost bin but there are other ways that I can really maximize the potential of that banana skin if I just put in a little bit more effort. Another way that is actually really easy to do is just get some scissors, chop up your banana, peel and put it in a jar of water. So I have this one here and just put your banana peel and fill it up with water. The best water to use for anything like this is rainwater if you have that available or some filtered water because a lot of our tap water has got some chlorine and things in it that can inhibit plant growth but if you are leaving this out anyway any chlorine will evaporate off it. So I just put a little cloth over the top and secure that down and that stops any bugs getting in there, you don't want any midges or things to start breeding in here. So definitely put a lid on it and you want it to be breathable, you want the oxygen to be able to get in there. You know I only eat one banana a day so I'll chop one banana up, chuck it in, the next day chuck another one in and then about day three or four I'll strain off the banana skins and keep them and then the water, the banana water, it'll be thick and creamy the water and then you can dilute that down so I usually just double it or put it in a bucket with some more water and then I can use that as a fertilizer on my fruit trees and I tend to prioritize my fruit trees with what is flowering and or what is coming into flower at the time so that it can really boost the nutrition of that plant and give me some really delicious tasting fruit. And if you do have mulch around your fruit trees then you will want to just pull back some of the mulch to put the fertilizer in so that the mulch doesn't just absorb all the fertilizer and it doesn't reach the soil or the plants. So pull back the mulch, pop your fertilizer on and then wait for it to absorb down into the soil before you recover up the soil with the mulch. So once I've strained off the banana peels I then obviously have the liquid and then I have the banana peels left over. Those banana peels I can then go and chuck around my trees under the mulch or I can pop them in the compost bin. You can also just dig them into the garden or if you are starting a new garden bed you can spread them out in the garden bed and then pop your topsoil or compost on top and they will slowly break down and release potassium into the soil as like a slow release fertilizer. The other way that you can do it is you can dry your banana skins out so that they are really dry. You can do this by just chucking them on a tray and putting them in the sun for a day and then once they are completely dry you can crush them up and use that as sort of like a powder on your fruit trees or around your vegetables especially if you're growing food in containers or pots. Like I have my pallet planters I always have to be adding more nutrients back into the soil because there's only a limited supply of soil and there's a lot of plants in there using up all the good nutrients. So I do continuously like to add in extra plant matter or extra nutrients to the soil. Okay so the last one from the kitchen. Coffee grounds are another great thing that you can reuse in the garden to feed your plants and your soil and they also work as a pest deterrent so they have multiple functions and are amazing for the garden. So coffee grounds the ones that you want to use have been used so they aren't fresh coffee it has been put through water you know whether you've put it in a percolator or you have an actual coffee machine and you have flushed it with water as you've made your coffee once you've done that and it has been put through water then they are quite ph neutral which means that they're not going to raise the ph or lower the ph too much in your garden. Some people say that they are quite acidic and that can be the case but if they have been put through water they tend to be more on the neutral side. I don't tend to have a lot of coffee grounds at home so there is another way that you can get them is going to speak to your local barista, coffee place, cafe and if they don't have any use for them they'll probably throw them out so by you going down and saying hey like do you have any coffee grounds i'd love to get them maybe it can be a regular thing and you'll be helping them. These little bugs are the ones that you don't want in your fertilizers. By going down and speaking to them you'll be helping them and they'll be helping you and it is a win-win situation and your garden will be really happy for it. So with the coffee grounds you can just chuck them in the compost bin or you can mix them in with the soil the other way that you can do it is just chuck them in a bucket of water maybe like one cup of grounds to a bucket of water stir and sit for 24 hours so it really infuses into the water and use that to feed your plants. The other thing that you can do with coffee grounds is if you sprinkle them around your plant it can deter a lot of pests in the garden and I did actually read that it can deter cats so if you do have a problem with cats digging in your garden then maybe try putting out some coffee grounds and see if that works because some people have had success with that. Okay so there is one more thing that you can do with something that you may have inside which I don't personally have but you may have a fish tank at home and if you do have a fish tank or a fish pond or aquaponics and they are fresh water not salt water then you can use that as a natural fertilizer. So all the fish poop and you know broken down plant material and things like that can be really good for the garden. If you're cleaning out your fish tank then just pour that water onto your plants on your garden and you have a another really good natural fertilizer. Another thing you may have that you can use as a natural fertilizer is wood ash from the fire. So wood ash is again this one is high in potassium and can raise the pH in your soil so you don't want to use it on anything like blueberries or things that like a quite acidic soil and just use a little bit try not to chuck you can just chuck it in your garden in the compost. I like to put mine in the compost and then mix it through the soil and then it becomes like a slow release fertilizer in there for the plants. Another thing to note is you want to make sure that you're using wood ash that has not come from treated wood like if you've used treated wood or wood that has chemicals on it you don't want to be using the wood ash in your garden so make sure it is natural wood that has been burnt in the fire if you are going to use that on your garden. All right so we also have compost tea which is basically just getting your compost mixing I don't know like a few handfuls of compost in some water and it is best again to try and use rainwater for this so it doesn't have any residual chemicals or chlorine in it and mix the compost in the water and let it sit for a day or two to release a lot of the nutrients into the water and then you can use that as a liquid fertilizer. So there's times when you just can't add actual new compost to your soil when you know you might have your plant boxes or your pots already filled with soil and lots of plants growing at the time that you can't top it up with compost so using a compost tea is a really good way to get those nutrients into your garden into those pots and replenish those nutrients that have been used up by the plants without having to add more soil on top so compost tea is a great one for that or if you're adding nutrients into your house plants as well. All right so next up we have seaweed and this is something that you may have heard of before you may already be using in your garden you can get concentrate seaweed liquid fertilizers. I always go organic and seaweed fertilizer is probably the only one that I buy externally to put into my garden as a fertilizer but you can make your own if you do live near the coast and you have access to seaweed you can make your own organic seaweed fertilizers. Just be aware that in some places it is illegal to take seaweed off the beach so check with that first and then you just chop up your seaweed chuck it in a bucket of water or a barrel of water and let it rot down and like brew into a seaweed tea. This is obviously going to smell really funky so put it somewhere that you're not going to smell very often and cover it again cover any of your brews and teas you want to cover so that you don't get an infestation of like mosquitoes in there so just something that is breathable because you want the oxygen you want it to be able to breathe you don't want to kill off any of the bacteria so put on some you know cotton or fabric that is breathable and then just secure it with a tie and you just want to stir it every day or so to really try and release some of those nutrients out of the seaweed into the water dilute it down a bit and then use that on your plants as a natural organic homemade seaweed fertilizer which your plants will love so earlier I spoke about plants so that you can grow at home to sort of farm your own natural fertilizers and one of those is comfrey so comfrey is an amazing permaculture plant because it has so many beneficial relationships within the garden it has got beautiful big bushy leaves and it provides habitat for your beneficial insects in the garden it's got lots of shade lots of little spots for them to live it is often used in food forests or as edging in gardens it grows really fast and really bushy and lush and provides a lot of organic plant matter that you can then chop so you can chop all the leaves off and it will regrow back again and you can make up a brew of comfrey tea so that is just chop up some of those leaves chuck them in a bucket of water and let that steep down and brew and to get all the nutrients out of the leaves into the water so you're going to want to leave that for a few weeks again stirring it regularly and try and get as much of those nutrients out of the leaves as you can into the water then you can discard the leaves putting them in the compost or putting them back in the garden to release the leftover nutrients and also provide fiber and organic plant matter back into your garden and then the fertilizer you can dilute down and use as a comfrey tea fertilizer and comfrey has a really good level of mpk which is again the nitrogen the phosphorus and the potassium which are essential for plant health and plant growth and it has a little bit of everything so it is a really good all-rounder for the garden and the way that comfrey works is that it has really deep roots that dive down and draw up lots of those nutrients from deeper down in the garden and then by cutting the leaves off you've just got this concentrated form of all of the nutrients that you can then use on your garden another way that you can do it is you can just do chop and drop which is one of my favorite methods it's super easy i do it all the time in my back garden i just chop the leaves off and use it as a mulch just lay it down around your plants and the leaves will start to break down and those nutrients will go into the top layer of the soil um yeah so chop and drop chop and drop is one of my favorite methods and you may hear me talk about it quite a lot it is just one of the easiest things and i try and make a lot of my gardening easy and just flow rather than if it's too hard and i feel like it's too much effort then i'll think about it for ages and not actually do it i'll often have sort of different ways of doing things it'll just depend on how much effort i feel like putting in at the time um and that is just purely so that it's sustainable for me you know it needs to be something that i can just know i can just go and do whenever i want and not just be like oh man like i don't have time but i know i really need to make a brew that's why there's always options just you know chuck the banana skins in the garden or just chop and drop everything and lay it down and it will still be really good for the garden um better than just doing nothing and thinking about it for ages and procrastinating because that is something that i do very well so i come up with these options so that i always have something that i can go to when i'm not feeling like being fully in the zone all right so we have so many more things there's so many things that you have at home that you can grow or use to make fertilizers and another one is worm tea if you have a worm farm or you want to get something that you can have at home to make your own natural fertilizers then a worm farm is a really good idea because the worms will use up the scraps and then produce a by-product which is the worm tea and a liquid fertilizer that you can mix in with some water or any of your other fertilizers and create this amazing natural organic fertilizer for your garden that's going to just really boost your garden's health and nutrition and give you so much more food so again it's just nature doing its thing and providing the goods all right so we also have composted manure tea poo tea composted poo tea um it is another great one that you can use using composted manure in your garden is really really good to add fiber add nutrients it's got a lot of the mpk in it different animal manures will have different levels of each so some may be higher in nitrogen some may be really low in potassium and things like that but most of the time if you spread it out any sort of animal manure is great for the garden there's a few things you just want to make sure one is that it's organic you don't want to be getting animal manure from places that use chemicals fertilizers you know lots of pesticides antibiotics and things like that because that is going to go through the system of the animal and into the poo and then you're going to just put that in your garden so you really want to look into that and get some organic animal manure the other thing is is that you want it to be composted or aged so fresh raw manure is high in urea and it is really strong so it's going to just burn your plants roots and that is not going to help them they'll probably die you want to make sure it's really old or aged and or it has been composted down another reason that you would like it to be composted down is that you know these animals are eating grass eating grass seeds and those grass seeds will just pop up and grow in the garden so you'll end up sort of in a position with grass seeds and where grass is growing all through your garden if it hasn't been composted down first because the composting process will kill off those grass seeds and by the time it gets to your garden then it will just be amazing nutritious composted manure that's going to feed your plants without just growing a lot of weeds because we don't want that so with the composted manure you can just chuck a handful of that in a bucket of water just give it a big stir and leave it for 20 24 hours or longer to sort of like break down and all dissolve into the water so the water it becomes like poo tea and then i can use that on the garden okay so speaking of weeds we also have weed tea so that is something that i've done a whole video on and i will definitely link the video to that um so you don't have to hear me blab on about the weed tea again but basically it is when you are doing your weeding just pick up all your weeds chuck them in a bucket fill it with water and just let it brew let it rot down you know make the most out of those weeds let the weeds do the work let those weeds feed your garden rather than the weeds becoming a pest turn them into something great and use them to your advantage and make weed tea fertilizer for your garden to grow more food there are so many things that you can use to make natural fertilizers and there are so many more than what i've spoken about but i just wanted to it locked down as to 15 natural organic fertilizers that you can make at home to feed your plants thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope you got some tips so that you can make your own natural organic fertilizers at home and really work with nature to grow heaps more food and i will see you next week