Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray

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Looking for a wonderful plant fertilizer that you can make from kitchen scraps? Your plants will love this Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray!

Banana Peel Fertilizer Spray

Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray

Bananas are a staple in our little house. I love them dried for an easy snack, in Banana Bread, in cookies (recipe coming next month), in Banana Pudding, and on top of my oatmeal. We also like them because they are the cheapest fruit than we can buy per pound locally, all year round. That means we have a lot of banana peels at our house at any given time! Banana peels are excellent for so many different things (big list of uses coming next month!), but my very favorite is for my new favorite plant food… Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray.

Call me crazy but this spray really works, my plants love it!

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Why Banana Peels?

Here’s just a few of the important minerals and nutrients that are contained in banana peels:

  • Potassium (Contains 42% when dried)
  • Phosphorus
  • Calcium
  • Manganese
  • Sodium
  • Magnesium
  • Sulfur

All wonderful things for your plants!

Since these are just something you might toss in the trash or feed to your animals (which is also very good for them too!), banana peels make an excellent cheap/free fertilizer for your plants. Here is the mixture that I put together with mine. Keep in mind it will take at least a day to make (drying time).

Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray

What You Need:

Step One: Take your banana peels and either place them in your food dehydrator or place them in a sunny area outside where they will not be disturbed. Make sure they are on parchment paper or in some kind of container so you can easily collect the dried pieces. Let these dry until they are completely dry. You may also want to prep any egg shells, leave them sitting on your counter while the peels are drying so they are fully dried out as well.

Step Two: After the banana peels have completely dried, place the pieces into your food processor with the egg shell. Pulse until you have a fine powder.

Step Three: Add the powder and the Epsom salts to the spray bottle. This recipe should fill a 32 ounce spray bottle. If your bottle is smaller you can either place it in a couple bottles or half the recipe.

Step Four: Add water to your spray bottle until it’s just about full. Swirl and shake the spray until the salts and the powder have dissolved into the water.

Banana Peel Plant Fertilizer Spray

You can use this mixture on houseplants on your garden plants. Don’t spray directly onto plants that are in full sunlight, spray into the soil around the plants. Remember, this is a fertilizer so don’t use too much at one time or you could burn your plants. Experiment with each type of plant to see how much it will need. If you cannot get the mixture to spray (too thick), just add a little around the base of the plants.

For a larger garden, you can mix up this mixture in bulk buckets and pour around your plants. Happy Growing!

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Check out even more Gardening Tips on Little House Living and find even more Uses for Banana Peels.

The Gardening and Preserving Journal is here! If you are gardening or planning on doing any preserving this year, you NEED this wonderful sprial bound journal! Get your own copy here.

 

What kinds of fertilizers do you use on your garden? Have you ever tried making anything with leftover foods?

merissabio

 

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43 Comments

  1. Interesting. I love this. I do throw peels straight under my rose bushes as fertilizer and rarely fertilize with anything else and I have beautiful roses every year.

    1. even banana peel or other foods leftover never neglect coz even in the garbage you can find a gold. Im very thankfull God bless stay safe always

  2. Is there any source of nitrogen in banana peel fertilizer? I am wondering if plants also need nitrogen to thrive?

  3. I cut my banana peels into small pieces and store them in a plastic bag in my freezer, until I am ready to plant my tomatoes. I then thaw them out and put a ‘handful’ peels & about a cup of powdered milk into the hole, with the tomato plant on top, and water it well.
    I’ve had no problem with ‘blossom end rot’ since I’ve started doing this and I have nice healthy plants.

  4. My garden nut husband is standing here reading this over my shoulder lol. I think we’re definitely going to try it. My kids eat bananas like candy bars, so we have no lack of peelings. 🙂

  5. I have an old coffee container on my kitchen counter that I toss egg shells, coffee grounds, veggies and fruit scraps into as I use these items. Eventually the contents make it to the compost pile. Funny, but with banana peels, I prefer to chop them up and store them in a baggie. As other folks have noted, roses love them!

  6. This is so funny, my mother has done this for years. She never wastes a banana peel. And yes her roses are beautiful and never does anything. But she doesn’t just have a green thumb, she has a green hand, lol. I have a black hand, lol.

  7. WE LOVE THIS! We just tried banana peels as a ant repellent on our site. Can’t wait to try this as we love using what we got and natural alternatives to household tasks. Will be tweeting this.

  8. I have been doing this for the past season in the garden – making fertilizer “smoothies” using banana peels, egg shells and water, and I began to add nettle in too as this apparently brings some nitrogen into the mix. Without the nitrogen this mix tends to increase leaf growth and size, but not flowers and fruit setting in my experience. So its best for leafy veg or non-fruit producing plants unless you add an additional nitrogen source.

    Placing a banana peel on the top of a pot/top layer of soil helps fruits to ripen as well e.g. tomatoes

    1. My tomato plants in the pots have lots of green and healthy leaves, but the fruits are very less.
      So, can I put the banana peels directly in the pot???

  9. I’ve been looking for a DIY fertilizer to spritz the bottom of my seedlings now that they’ve been transplanted to bigger pots. Do you know if this affects whether crops or organic or not? If you’re growing an organic garden, would you recommend only using egg shells from an all organic chicken? Thanks!

  10. Lovely post, I will definitely be trying this. I love stumbling across new green products. Even better that I can make it at home. Thanks for sharing!

    -Sara

  11. This is great! I am so glad I found your site. My father was a big organic gardener, and I learned a lot from him. But now that he has passed away, I no longer have anyone to turn to for advice. Thanks!

  12. I did this just the other day actually. I had a lot of brown banana peels since I keep bananas in the freezer for smoothies. But since it’s the middle of winter in Michigan and there’s no good place to dry them out naturally, I just put them all in the oven at 200′ F for a few hours. This made them hard like chips, and I was able to blend them into a fine dry powder. It makes my plants very happy. 🙂

  13. Hi. I started collecting banana peels a month ago to use as a natural fertilizer. I only use organic bananas to avoid pesticides and other poison matters that conventional bananas are sprayed with! I can’t wait to se the results in my garden and green house this summer.

  14. I just whipped up a batch and ground everything pretty fine but the powder doesn’t dissolve into my water and it keeps stopping up the spray bottle! I ground in the food processor, spice grinder and bullet blender to be sure!!

  15. Just whipped up a batch of this and fed my plants … can’t wait to see the results. I am especiall looking forward to my tomato’s recovery — pretty sure the poor thing is magnesium deficient.

    Thank you for the helpful tips!

  16. I would like to know how to store this fertilizer and how long it will last sitting out. Thank you.

  17. Gosh wish I had seen this post yesterday. I had just bought a bag of 10 slightly over ripe bananas, the skins were browning but the insides were very good. I bought them to make banana ice cream with just 2 ingredients. I put them in the freezer and threw the peels in the trash. Bet I don’t do that again LOL

    1. I love your idea I am a first time grower .I want to stay organic as much as I can . I am so looking forward to doing this .About the nitrogen problem I am going to add coffee grounds to the spray .I feel like this would be a great way to do this . i thank you for your help.

  18. I tried this banana fertilizer foliar spray, but unlike the article states, and I was wondering how it’s possible to begin with, but egg shells do not dissolve in water! Foiar is ok I guess, but no point to put egg shells in it as its not water soluble!

      1. If they are dry enough crush them & put thru your food processor to the powder stage.I have always saved eggshells crushed them & threw them in the garden .Anything should grind into powder if it is dry enough.

    1. You are right, the calcium in egg shells is not water soluble. Even if you crush them to a fine powder and spray on the soil, I don’t think that it will act quickly as you’d usually expect from a liquid fertilizer. I think it will take the calcium longer time to dissolve in the soil, like with non-liquid fertilizers.

  19. Thank you for your blog. I am going to use this idea with the peels. A few ideas I had to work with it. I am going to use the water from my boiled eggs, (calcium in water) and I am going to soak my non organic banana peels with white vinegar water first and rinse well. This is to help remove any pesticides. Thanks for all the info. you provide.

  20. what is the date this was blogged on? i’m using your banana peel plant fertilizer spray recipe for my science fair project and i need information for this particular writing for my bibliography.

    1. I have 2 avocado plants which I left on my deck all summer, almost killed them watering them to much, they got root rot, but managed to save them because they’re grafted, but anyways I sprinkle used coffee grounds on mine, makes the leaves greener

  21. I’ve tried this it doesn’t go well with my spray nozzle and it almost ruin it so I’ve just pour the liquid manually..I’ve blend both dried eggs and banana peel I even cut them into small pieces before putting them in the food processor for almost 5 or more minutes and there’s still a small chunk left that can’t go through the main nozzle hole and tube.I’ll probably be using strainer next time to collect the powder from it.

  22. Thank you so much i learn more and am happy becouse i love faming it will asist me to work without worry about fertrizer.Thanks.

    1. Thank you for this. I’ve put some peels to dry. Would you say watering once a week with this mix would suffice for most plants?

  23. I have read that fruit trees really benefit from bananas, so I just take the fresh peel and bury it right in the soil at the base of each of my fruit trees and let the worms and microbes do their work!