Banana Peels For Hydrangeas

Using Banana Peels For Hydrangeas

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Banana peels can make an excellent fertiliser, but not all plants appreciate a banana peel feed. Where do hydrangeas fall? Do they love a banana milkshake or are they more of a chocolate lover? Let’s find out.

Using Banana Peels For Hydrangeas

Banana peels can make a good fertiliser for hydrangeas but there are a few drawbacks to using them, let me get into that below.

The first one is that you really need to be using organic bananas, and a lot of us don’t buy organic bananas. Just think about it, commercial bananas are sprayed with all kinds of chemicals.

You are then mixing these chemicals into a fertiliser which you are going to apply directly to your plants, who knows what dangerous remnants could be left.

Why do People Use Banana Peels?

The simple answer is that they are cheap, readily available and have a great NPK rating for promoting flowering over vegetative growth.

What is NPK I hear you ask? Well for those of you not well versed in the world of plant fertilisers NPK is the ratio between Nitrogen: Phosphorus: Potassium in the fertiliser.

The NPK of banana peel fertiliser is apparently  0.1:0.1:2.3. So we can see that it is higher in potassium than anything else, the problem comes not from the ratio, but rather how much of each there is.

So while the ratio may be good the actual amount of each element is small, and this is understandable, shoving a few banana peels in some water for a few weeks and expecting it to make a world-beating fertiliser is a little optimistic.

So, Should You Use Banana Peel Fertiliser On Hydrangeas?

The answer is, it’s up to you. It will work, and it will help promote flowering. But is it a worthwhile way to spend your time and energy? I’m not so sure.

There are much more potent potassium-rich fertilisers out there, and even special hydrangea fertilisers that don’t require you to have a load of jars of rotting bananas in your house.

Hydrangea Feed
Vitax Hydrangea Feed 1KG
£7.84 £7.49 (£7.49 / kg)
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03/01/2024 09:13 pm GMT

How To Make Banana Peel Fertiliser

The good news is that if you do want to make this fertiliser, it is really simple. Simply get a load of banana peels, from organic bananas, and cut them up into small pieces. A food processor speeds up this process a lot.

Then shove them in a large mason jar, one with a really secure fitting lid, and fill the jar with regular tap water.

Leave them for at least two weeks, although with most homemade fertilisers usually the longer you leave it the stronger your concoction becomes.

Then strain out the bananas and use the water as a feed, you don’t need to dilute it.

This no dilution needed to me shows that it is a weak fertiliser, with all other homemade fertilisers I know of like nettle fermentations, you do need to dilute the end product.

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