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Breakfast Anyone?

 
   Instead of spending a lot of money buying expensive fertilizers, you can recycle many kitchen scraps to make your own.  If you are serious about helping the environment, you should!

  Kitchen scraps account for 12.4% of all MSW (municipal solid waste).  When you add 13.1% for yard trimmings to that figure, it’s a whopping 25.3% of what is in our landfills!

Many people do not realize that even biodegradable items do not break down well in landfills.  The amount of air and moisture does not reach sufficient levels in a massive landfill for decomposition to happen efficiently.  Landfills have yielded newspapers that are 50 years old that look as fresh as the day they were dumped!  Items that will break down quickly in your compost pile at home may take much, much longer to break down in a landfill.  I have a whole section planned on composting, but the following lists of some of my favorite items to use as fertilizer.

Breakfast is an important meal for your plants, too!  Egg shells and coffee grounds, two by-products from the most widely consumed breakfast foods in the world, are wonderful natural fertilizers.  Either item can be added to your compost pile, but with minimal work, they can be used as stand-alone products.  Your roses, blueberries and a whole host of other plants will be overjoyed when you share your breakfast with them!

Craft Cycler LogoWould You Like Those Over-easy?

Eggs in a carton Egg shells are roughly 93% calcium carbonate, which is commercially sold as “lime”.I generally dry them out and use them broken into small pieces.While they take a while to break down this way, they serve another important purpose for me – They are an important tool in my war on slugs.  I live about thirty feet from a tidal creek in New Jersey, which is Shangri-La for slugs.  The jagged edges of the shells strongly discourage my slimy little enemies from eating the leaves from every plant I have.  (I hear that snails will not cross over egg shells, either.)     Egg shells can also be dried out in the oven and powdered.  Simply place them in an oven-safe container and bake them at a low temperature (about 150 degrees until they are easily powdered) or wash them and place them in container in the sun.  (I use a Corning Ware casserole dish with a glass lid on a sunny windowsill.)  Once dried, break them up into little pieces and then grind them up in to a powder. The powdered result can be broadcast throughout your garden just like commercially produced lime.  Aside from the price, one of the other advantages of egg shells over lime is that egg shells also contain trace amounts of other nutrients and minerals, including nitrogen, calcium, and phosphoric acid.

Craft Cycler Logo Another Cup of Joe?

Coffee grounds also contain a plethora (I love that word!) of trace elements that are good for what you grow. Again, you will find nitrogen and phosphoric acid, in addition to carbohydrates, potash, sugars, vitamins and caffeine. Wet coffee grounds can cause mold around plants, so they can also be dried in the oven and worked into the soil or used as a light mulch around any plants that you would treat with an acid mix, such as roses, azaleas, blueberries, etc. Toss the filter onto your compost pile to add nutrients there, also. When dried and mixed together, coffee grounds and powdered egg shells make a fantastic additive for your soil and can be used to replace lime.

So the next time you think of skipping breakfast,
think of your roses!









Eco Facts

One quart of motor oil can contaminate 2,000,000 gallons of water if disposed of improperly..
Yarn Earth

A plastic sandwich bag takes over 100 years to decompose in a landfill.