Banana peels are good fertilizer because of what they do not contain. They contain absolutely no nitrogen. While plants need nitrogen (remember the NPK on fertilizers), too much nitrogen will create lots of green leaves but few berries or fruits.
Banana peels can be placed directly onto pot plant soil, or around the base of your garden as mulch. As they decompose, they will release nutrients into the soil to feed plants.
Lemon Peels
Lemon peels are an excellent source of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Adding them to compost is a great way to make them nutritious. The peels can also be used to acidify the soil. Just dry the citrus peels and grind them into a powder.
Broken down egg shells on average contain 39.15 percent calcium, 0.4 percent nitrogen and 0.38 percent magnesium.
Coffee grounds have a high nitrogen content, along with a few other nutrients plants can use. In compost, they help create organic matter that improves the ability of soil to hold water. It's best to add coffee grounds, not whole beans, to compost.
Hence, ammonia is the richest source of nitrogen on a mass percentage basis.
Is Banana Peel Water Good for Plants? Using banana water for plants doesn't have many cons if you do it correctly. Banana peels contain essential nutrients for plant growth, like magnesium, phosphorus, and calcium. The amount of nutrients infused into water is very unlikely to cause fertilizer overdose.
Nitrogen-rich (“green”) materials include coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, fruit, egg shells, disease-free plant clippings, even chicken droppings.
Potassium encourages both fruiting and flowers, so that makes banana peels a great fertilizer for fruit and vegetables like tomatoes or peppers, or any flowering ornamental plants. 'Bananas also contain calcium, which is a vital nutrient in combating blossom end rot in tomatoes. '
Safely Composting Banana Peels
Unless you bury them deeply, you also risk attracting pests and rodents.
Like any plant material, banana peels contain nutrients, including potassium and phosphorous, essential nutrients in fertilizer. However, unless the peels are dried, they're mainly composed of water (over 80%), which means the amount of nutrients they have compared to regular fertilizer is pretty low.
A full-sized banana, like the peel, can take up to 3 or 4 weeks to fully decompose. Whether you compost with the help of worms via vermicomposting or through traditional compost, which gets hot as materials break down outdoors, bananas will break down in the process, adding nitrogen to the compost.
Add leafy plant clippings to the compost.
Green plant clippings, weeds, and freshly cut flowers from your lawn can also increase the nitrogen found in your compost.
Coffee grounds contain approxi- mately 2 percent nitrogen, 0.06 percent phosphorus, and 0.6 per- cent potassium by volume. They also contain many micronutrients including calcium, magnesium, boron, copper, iron, and zinc.
The list of nitrogen-fixing plants for agriculture is quite versatile and includes, among others: Beans: fava (aka faba, broad), alfalfa, green (aka French), runner, field, sweet, peanuts (aka groundnuts), soybeans, cream, black-eyed, or purple-hulled beans, lupins, lentils, cowpeas, chickpeas.
If you're unsure which plants to use banana water on, think “tomatoes, peppers, roses, orchids, succulents, staghorn ferns, air plants and banana trees,” says Stephenson. She says that banana peel water is useful to prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes, which is when the bottom of the tomato starts to turn brown.
The shells also contain other minerals that help plants grow, including potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium. Eggshells are, therefore, an effective and inexpensive fertilizer for outdoor garden soil and houseplants.
The quickest source of nitrogen to the plants are the nitrogen fertilizers. As the nitrogen fertilizers mixed with soil and the plants absorb nitrogen in both the form such as ammonium and nitrate ions. The plants absorb most of the nitrogen from the nitrate ions.
Let's begin with nitrogen, because it's the nutrient needed in greatest amounts and the one most readily lost from the soil. The richest organic sources of nitrogen are manures, ground-up animal parts (blood meal, feather dust, leather dust) and seed meals (soybean meal, cottonseed meal).
Recipe for homemade nitrogen fertilizer #2
Add two cups of used coffee grounds to 5 gallons of water. Leave overnight, strain the liquid into a bottle and add to the soil or spray onto your plant's leaves. For plants that like a lower acid content, used decaffeinated coffee grounds.