Just a silly thought turned question. Where I live the soil is empty of almost everything plants need to grow. I was thinking about nothing as I went to get a banana from the kitchen.
The banana's are nicely ripe. The thought popped into my head that instead of throwing over ripe bananas away I could peel them and mix the mush into soil around plants and bushes? Any thoughts or experience doing this? tia.
Composting is not new.
i worm compost veggie and fruit scraps and that makes great plant food. all banana peels go in there and the worms take care of them. it also takes care of all paper scraps we have so that works great for adding stuff back to the gardens.
bananas are edible even if the outer peel is black, many people use them when they get over- ripe to make banana bread or muffins. i like using them as a fish sauce, mix with a little honey, vinegar, ginger and blend until smooth, but there are other uses (smoothies).
songbird
Wow, that sounds interesting. Just to be sure: this sauce gets poured OVER the cooked fish? Or? Could use lemon instead of vinegar?
HB
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yes, i like sweet and sour together, lemon juice is good too instead of or even along with the vinegar, you don't need much of either to get the sour. i never measure this out, but it is about 1 tsp of vinegar to tablespoon of honey for each banana. adjust to your own preferences is the standard disclaimer. :)
sometimes i'll slice bananas and put the honey, lemon, vinegar and some cinamon and stir until everything is coated and eat them like that.
songbird
(Wipes drool from screen)...Gotta try that!
HB
Thanks, for a very interesting article.
For those that don't follow links, this should be of interest:
Unlike Clopyralid, which survives the heat, most chemicals used in lawn care and agriculture break down completely enough to satisfy organic farmers.
I found this on Clopyralid, the problem chemical:
Clopyralid is known for its ability to persist in dead plants and compost, and has accumulated to phytotoxic levels in finished compost in a few highly publicized cases. This first came to light in Washington State when, during 2000 and 2001, residues of clopyralid were detected in commercial compost, and compost made at a municipal site damaged tomatoes and other garden plants planted in it. Word quickly spread to other local and state governments and in 2002, DowAgro, the manufacturer of clopyralid, voluntarily deregistered it for use on domestic lawns in the US[5] and it is banned in several US states but it is found in consumer products in Europe such as Scotts Verdone Extra and Vitax Lawn Clear 2.
Drew Lawson wrote: ...
if you're worried about pesticides in bananas harming your compost you could always buy organic bananas...
i've been worm composting banana peels for years now and the worms take care of them fairly quickly. if you bury them in the bins they don't smell or cause any issues apart from the common sense ones you'll develop as you learn how to worm compost.
the issues of fermenting and causing problems would be if you put a huge amount of them in a very small bin all at once which can overload it. but if you have that much to do you can refrigerate it or freeze chunks of it and add it over time to give the system time to digest it.
my response here to peak demand loads is to keep enough bins of worms to handle them. so when Ma decides to make fruit salad for a hundred i have enough bins to put all the scraps in at one shot. no smell, no mess, just some time spent cutting things up so they fit and the worms take care of it all in a few days or a few weeks/months depending upon what it is (melon rinds are gone within days, pineapple tops and cores may take a few months).
songbird
Much of what folks compost over time I compost in less than 24 hours... everything that vegetarian critters eat goes on the lawn in my back yard... amazing how much kitchen scrap and garden waste deer, Canada geese, woodchucks, rabbits, and other critters will process into fertilizer within hours... even meat fat/trimmings are composted; crows miss nothing. My composter handles what critters won't eat; coffee grounds, tea bags, onion trimmings, potato parings, citrus, berry cores, grape stems, and many other items, even shredded paper. I don't put melon rinds in my composter, during warm weather melon rinds are a good source of water for many critters, even song birds. Banana peels take too long to compost and critters won't eat them, those get tossed into a hedgerow or under a spruce tree where they wither away but it can take a few years... I don't go through more than a couple three dozen bananas in a year... over ripe bananas go into baked goods (muffins) and smoothies. Uh oh, one of my resident composter families just landed, first place they head is to my office window where earlier I put out seeds for song birds, I'll put out more seeds later when the geese move on to their main job of fertilizing several acres of lawn, mother goose stands guard:
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