Composting kitchen scraps for use in the garden is a classic green living practice, but there are many kitchen waste items that can also be put to good use in other ways in the garden. From hot peppers to paper towel rolls, here are seven kitchen waste items to make your home and garden healthy and happy.
- Paper Towel Rolls: Trim them down to about 2 inches high and press them into the soil around seedlings, this serves as an added layer of protection from pests such as slugs. Paper towel rolls can also be used as small planter pots for growing from seed.
- Crushed Egg Shells: make a great addition to your compost, especially a worm compost where egg shells are crucial to help the worms reproduce. Egg shells add calcium and aerate soil, they are especially helpful when growing tomatoes.
- Used Coffee Grounds: also a good item to add to the compost. Coffee grounds make a good mulch and look beautiful scattered around the surface of the soil. They are rich in nitrogen which is especially good for veggies, including tomatoes and peppers.
- Nut Shells: Most nut shells including peanuts, pistachios, and even sunflower seeds (yeah, I know not nuts) to aerate soil, just make sure to wash off any salt or seasoning before adding to the garden.
- Hollowed Citrus Shell: use hollowed or squeezed halved citrus fruits upside-down in the garden to attract snails and slugs away from your plants. Not sure why it works but they are attracted to the citrus, it's up to you what to do with them next.
- Hot Peppers: Use the waste from hot peppers, such as seeds and the tops for pest control. Blend the waste, strain, mix with water in a spray bottle and use the spray to deter pests from your plants. The leftover pulp can be added to your compost.
- Gable-Top Container: trim the tops off leaving about 6-8" of depth to the bottom of the container to start your seeds.
(Re-edited from a post originally published on 6.04.2010 - CM)
(Images: grapefruits: Wikipedia Commons, paper towel rolls: Tom Wright)
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ok, I'm sorry to be that commenter, but seriously: the commas in this post are out of control.
Ok. I'm off to clean the fridge and go off to the garden.
@KATIEBOT
http://tinyurl.com/2cxeqzl
@katiebot -- and to think that this was "edited from a post originally published on 06.05.10"!
Thanks for the note re coffee grounds being good for tomatoes - I am just about to plant my cherry tomatoes and I have several days of coffee grounds waiting to be used in the garden. I was originally going to add them to my rhododendron (as it likes acidic soil) but I will use them with the tomatoes instead. The rhodo will have to wait.
We compost with #2 through #6 and rarely have gable top containers, but the #1 sounds useful, though in a slightly different way.
Planting a sunflower seed in the middle of a short cardboard tube would make it easy to tell which sprouting green things were weeds and which were baby sunflowers. This solves our ongoing problem of what to pull up when weeding or hoeing.
Thanks for the idea.
Second the thanks for the coffee grounds tip, my tomatoes are getting those damn yellow leaves around the base again. Hopefully this with some eggshells will help.
@Katie: yeah that proper grammar is a real bitch isn't it?
What IS a gable top container?
Had to laugh at your comment JESS13, you are correct, of course.
I believe a gable top refers to a quart paper milk or juice container where the top is shaped like a gable.
I had to look up gable-top containers, too. A note on using hot peppers or cayenne to repel pests: small animals -- and possibly your cat -- can get that on their face and paws, then rub it into their yes as they try to wash it off. It's your call, but I stopped using capsaicin sprays and sprinkles a long time ago because of that. Much as I hate the neighborhood cats messing in my planters, I don't want to cause them pain. Or the bunnies or mice. Maybe the gophers.
Hot peppers sprays really work, as do chili flakes and other capsaicin-y things. I have no qualms about causing non-lethal pain to varmits in my garden. I will have to try the citrus-rind thing.
"Gable-top container" - I didn't know they were called that. Cool. And now I realize how much they look like little houses.
Ah, that's what they are, thank you! We once rented a house with a pool. Raccoons used to swim in it every night. I thought it was cute until I realized that they couldn't make a distinction between a pool and a bathroom. Sprinkling hot sauce around the pool kept them away but they never seemed to be in any sort of distress - they just kept away from the treated area.
I just found out that Starbucks will give you their used coffee grounds, you just have to ask for "grounds for the garden". They are free but you should call in advance and ask for them, if they're busy (which they usually are) they just throw them away, but they'll bag them up for you if you request them. I pick up a bag every couple of weeks and add it to my compost bin.