If your lawn is looking a little thin and yellow, then look no further than this incredibly simple gardening hack, which uses a common kitchen scrap to transform your turf
This humble little kitchen scrap can totally transform your garden, so don’t throw it in the food waste just yet.
As the warm summer months approach, everyone wants to make the most out of their gardens. For a lot of people, the lawn is the centrepiece of their green space, but it will always require a little tender loving care to keep it in the best condition possible.
Whether you will be using your garden to entertain this summer, or simply to relax and read a good book, this clever gardening hack that uses inexpensive kitchen scraps will create thick and lush grass – and the best part is, it’s seriously sustainable.
The experts from Garden Olive Firewood explain that all you need to truly transform your sad-looking lawn into one that’s really thriving is a common kitchen scrap most of us chuck in the compost a few times a week: eggshells.
Dan McCarthy, the owner of the sustainable firewood company, explains that there are a few reasons why you should use eggshells to fertilise your garden – which doesn’t only benefit your lawn, it can also seriously boost any border plants or potted blooms you have in your green space.
Eggshells are a powerful fertiliser, McCarthy explains, through PH buffering, enriching it with calcium, releasing nutrients into the soil, and overall improving the structure of your soil. As an added bonus, they also can deter some pests – so there are a lot of upsides to incorporating this expert-approved hack into your garden maintenance.
You can approach this hack a few ways. Firstly, you can simply crush your eggshells into a fine powder – which will help incorporate them into your soil faster. “Collect clean, dry eggshells and crush them into small pieces or powder,” explains the expert. “You can use a mortar and pestle, a rolling pin, or a food processor to crush them effectively. The finer the eggshells are crushed, the faster they will decompose and release nutrients into the soil.”
Then you need to mix them into your soil or compost – depending on which part of your garden you are working on. “Once you have crushed the eggshells, mix them into your compost pile or directly into the soil in your garden. Incorporating crushed eggshells into compost will help enrich it with calcium and other minerals, improving the overall nutrient content of the compost.”
If you don’t fancy crushing your eggshells, you can turn them into tea, which can be poured directly onto the area you want to encourage healthy soil and growth. “You can make a nutrient-rich compost tea using crushed eggshells. Simply steep crushed eggshells in water for a few days to extract the calcium and other minerals. Then, strain the mixture and use the resulting compost tea to water your plants,” McCarthy advises.
If you’re doing some new planting this spring, consider adding some of your crushed eggshells into the holes before you put the plant or seedling in place, “This will provide a slow-release source of calcium for the roots of the plants as they grow.”
You can also fill the bottom of your plant pots with crushed eggshells to create a nutrient-rich home for any seed you are growing, or alternatively add them directly to the base of your existing plants as an effective mulch.
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