Compost, General Gardening Wisdom, Organic Gardening

Put The Food Scarps To Use Straight From The Kitchen

 

You know food waste is a problem, but even your best efforts to Eat Every Bit Of Food In The House can’t take care of it all. Stuff like oyster shells and coffee grounds are still destined for the garbage can, unless you can think of another way to use them up. Your compost pile is a great solution for unwanted scraps, but it’s not the only one—and sometimes not the best one. Here, we’ve got eight ways to put food scraps to use in the garden instead of the compost bin.

  1. Milk
    Have some milk that’s starting to turn? You can spray it on plants suffering frommildew or moldto beat back fungus.
  2. Eggshells
    You might already know that tossing eggshells on the compost pile gives it a calcium boost, but don’t stop there. Eggshells are the perfect size for starting seeds, provided you plan ahead and crack the egg near the tip to allow for a bigger planting vessel. Use a pin to poke a small drainage hole in the bottom before adding soil and seeds. You can store your eggshell starters in egg cartons for a convenient tray until planting time. Then simply crack the bottom of the egg to allow roots to escape before planting directly in the ground.

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  1. Coffee Grounds Coffee grounds will give your compost pile some added nitrogen—a component of chlorophyll that is essential for photosynthesis—but you can alsouse them for mulching. Just be sure not to layer the grounds too thick—too much can prevent air and water from getting down to the roots. There’s some evidence that scattered coffee grounds candeter snails and slugs, too.

  2. Lettuce Hearts Regrow a used-up head of lettuce by placing the heart in a jar or cup with about a half-inch of water. Keep the jar on a windowsill or somewhere that gets a lot of light, and change the water every few days. Once the lettuce heart starts to sprout, you can transfer it to a pot of soil to give it more nutrients. You can re-grow scallions and leeks in water, too, provided you save the roots and 1 to 2 inches of the white bulb.

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Article source: Rodale’s Organic Life
Image source: SF Gate

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