Free Fertilizer With Leftover Tea

abi.something

April 10, 20230 found this helpful

I've been doing this for years now and I'm sure that by drying the bags out in the oven (be sure to take the cookie sheet out before you turn the oven on, but once dinner is out of the oven, slide your cookie sheet right back into your oven so that you're taking advantage of all your free heat that would otherwise just go to waste!) I dry everything out and then once a week I sit down and split the teabags open and pour out the used tea sweeping into a bucket that I keep out on the covered porch. Save the bags (minus the metal staples and strings). You take those and you can either use them just as they are in the bottom of your clay or plastic pots for extra protection around the drainage hole, or another great idea is to snip them up into tiny pieces and use them just as you would for vermiculite, as you would for any sort of spacer in your basic potting soil.

I usually get quite a good bucket full of tea sweepings, banana skins (finely minced, either in your blender or with your kitchen shears), eggshells and any other bit of kitchen waste that does not have any meat or fat (you'll just make bugs if that gets into your bucket!). Once everything is good and dried out then you can mince it by hand or in the food processor. My roses, azaleas and hydrangeas love this mix, and for the 'cost' of just cutting the bag open after it's dried out, you'd be mad to toss out such a great freebie!