How to Use Eggshells, Banana Peels, and Coffee Grounds in the Garden 

Drop some comments on how you use these three kitchen scraps!

what to use coffee grounds for: 2:33 what to use egg shells for: 4:55 what to use banana peels for 7:14

I put all three in a blender, then water that "smoothie" into the soil, and it seems to work wonders on my plants!

I dehydrate my banana peels and use an old blender to powder them. Same with eggshells. At the end of the growing season I sprinkle the powders, add all the compost, then cover with leaf mulch and straw saved from the hen house. In the spring I can plant directly into the straw. This is my no-till method.

Loved “it’s just gardening guys”. You’re so right, we humans do try to over complicate things. Keep on growing!

to summarize: be lazy and just throw them in the compost! Perfect, this is exactly what I have been doing!

If a snail crawls over coffee grounds, do they go a little faster? 🤔

Grew up with a coffee can on our counter, egg shells and coffee grinds, banana peels went into it. Every weekend we just grabbed the can mixed it up by hand and sprinkled in the garden.my great Nona and pap came here in 1920, our family has been doing it since then. My pap had wonderful gardens.

I love the way you explain things in layman's terms! Not everybody is an expert!

If you want more coffee grounds for garden or compost bin, starbucks bags their used coffee grounds and gives it away to gardeners for free. Just go to your local starbucks and ask an employee about it.

I get a ton of egg shells from local, family-run bakeries. Kind of the same idea with getting coffee grounds from coffee shops. Plus, you get more connections with people in your community. Nice way to get such a valuable calcium source for free.

It is great for the garden to combine the oven dried crushed eggshells to coffee grounds. The nutrients released are similar to diatomaceous earth and very beneficial for the soil. With banana peels, we have Staghorn and Elkhorn ferns and they almost devour the banana peels and I have just started sticking one or two banana peels on a tree trunk as the butterflies love feeding on them too.

Coffee grounds have never killed any plant I've grown or now have. I've learned how to garden since I was 8, and now I'm 59.

I boil my egg shells with a little bit of vinegar. It helps to break down the calcium and minerals in the shells. Then I add both the water and the shells to my garden

I bake my egg shells and then grind them in a coffee grinder that I purchased at a thrift shop for that purpose. I then scatter them in my garden or add them to the chickens’ feed. The added calcium helps the hens to lay eggs with stronger shells. The coffee grounds and banana peels go directly into my kitchen compost bin.

Love your shirt!! I used to work for Jim on his worm farm. Incredible operation, let me tell you. Tractor bucket after tractor bucket full of worms all day every day. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of worms. Gently harvested from (enormous) bed surfaces by pitchfork into the bucket, then into a big ol spinning screen cylinder that dumps the sifted bedding below and the worms come out the end into 1/2 50 gallon drums cut lengthwise, and then the drums are laid out alongside eachother on tables in the sun. The worms dig an inch into the dirt to escape the sun, and you go barrel to barrel scraping off the top inch of soil and throwing it into a tractor bucket to be thrown back on the beds. By the time you scrape each one the worms have buried themselves again and you do it until the dirt is all gone and you have nothing but 60lbs of straight up spaghetti. Then there are more empty 1/2 drums prepared with a shallow bed of fresh, wet peat moss, and each bed gets 20 lbs of worms. They’re cumulatively stored during the days harvest in a large, cooled trailer fitted with wooden makeshift rack systems for the worms. When 1pm comes the sun is south central florida is too direct and powerful to sun-sort anymore without killing the worms so harvesting stops and manpower is diverted to packaging and order fulfillment. We’d make 400-1000 bags of worms, shipping boxes and tape labels to them all, load a trailer with a AC wall unit and gas generator rigged to it for the 45 mile drive to the post office…. Where one or two of us would unload and count and scan every single box and stack half a dozen pallets with live product…all while covered head to toe in stinking worm shit! LOL Jim is one of the greatest men I’ve ever met in my life. He is an awe inspiring soldier of Christ who proclaims the gospel boldly and gives God credit for all things. He has a wonderful family that loves and respects him. He conducts his business on his own personal property and has made every single piece of infrastructure on that MASSIVE farm himself. My time spent working there was an incredible period in my life, both in and out of work. My faith became profound and God revealed Himself to me daily- and boy did I learn a LOT! Thanks for the video, and thanks for being God’s vessel this morning to remind me of such a wonderful time. To God be the glory!

The banana peel tea showed an amazing change in my apple tree sapling that was stunted and had no new growth previously. It turned around in a couple weeks. Someone should do a comparison study. I think this is a real thing.

During the winter, I've been putting my coffee grounds around my blueberry bushes, to give the soil a little kick of acidity. Besides, the blueberry plants are closer to my house than the compost bin, so less snow to trudge through.

My dad just dug a hole in the garden during the cooler months, and covered it up. He did this day after day, in rows, up and down his garden beds. Come Spring, he tilled it all together and had great soil. He then started over in the corner, down in between the rows of vegetables, all growing season, tilled everything under at the end of the season. He kept it simple and we had great food!

I tried the “banana tea” on all my tomato plants except 3 and you can definitely see a major difference in the plants! I am planning on trying it out on some others to see if it seems to help.

Another egg shell idea: I use cleaned dry eggshells in my very large aquarium filter, it helps the aquatic snails build nice shells. When I change the water, I use the old aquarium water to water my house plants and outdoor planters. Just sharing! I'm sure some of the dissolving shell ends up in the soil for my plants.

I just throw everything into the compost pile. Like you said, "keep it simple". Anything else is too much work for me. Thanks for another great video!

I like this guy: simple intro, explains it well (not boring), and a recap within a few seconds! 😁

So glad to hear that comment about breaking egg shells for the birds. Never heard it before - and bird mad!

Great video with a no- nonsense presentation. Keep them coming!

I’ve been adding a homemade mix of ground eggshells, seaweed & epsom salt when planting tomatoes, for the past few years. I used to have blossom end rot but now since using the above, I don’t.

Really like how you have used such a small space to turn it into a beautiful garden area, inspirational

I put coffee grounds, egg shells, bananas, other scraps in a blender with water : use that "liquid" on my vegetable garden.

I used to have lots of ants in my vegetable garden. I scattered some coffee grounds all over the surface, and they quickly disappeared. I do not know if it works with snails, but with ants it definitely works here in Spain.

My grandpa was always slicing banana-peels into small bits and threw it near his roses. He always had the nicest roses on the block.

We enjoy composting daily and weekly we add it to our bigger compost tubs. We mix egg shells, kitchen waste, coffee grounds, dried leaves, and old plants. Have a fantastic weekend 🌞

Great video! thanks for pulling this together. Regarding banana peals : when you throw the egg shells in the oven on the baking sheet, you can do the same on another sheet for the banana peals. dry them out, then once dry put them in a food processor to fragment the peal. Same principle as grinding the egg shells for speeding up organic decomposition. Then throw the dried coffee grounds and egg shells on top and you've got a dynamic organic fertilizer.

Slowly I am learning how to glow plants, flowers, fruits and vegetables, I am finding gardening very therapeutic and inspiring, spending time outside with my hands in the earth while observing nature grow.

May I suggest making a video of the types of diseases, fungi and rot on/in vegetables in a garden? What causes it and what can we do to prevent it/fix it? And what are the common reasons? That would be very helpful. Thanks man, I appreciate everything you share! Edit: banana peels work great for orchids. I have 4 orchids indoors, once a week I slice up the banana peels into small pieces and I'll just lay them around the plant.

4:48 That egg peeling clip is going to give me nightmares. Thanks...

Love all y'all do! Thank you. Putting my birdi beds together. Excited to get started filling them and seeing if I can grow anything in the shirt warm cycle

My Mother's trick is to when planting tomatoes is in the hole sprinkle Epsom salt add a handful of banana peel sludge , water then put the plant above it then fill hole with composted soil...perfect tomatoes every year!

Another good use for banana peels is for dust wipes for your indoor plants. Leaves a nice shine and also is great for them. 😎

Thanks! I have just started to organically garden because I was previously in a condo, and I’ve had questions about all these things. Very helpful!!

Love your comments on gardening -very practical & it so makes sense - the 3 things you mentioned are exactly what I do wrong in my flower beds...so I shall certainly do it differently this spring..thank you again...

I appreciate knowledge from those who have "been there, done that" (I'm new at trying to grow things) Thank you for sharing!

Finally, finally a gardener giving legitimate advice. I am soooo frustrated with all the “cool” tips and tricks that are complete nonsenses!!! Thank you sir! I’m subbing.

I am so glad that you mentioned that birds eat egg shells. I was putting some in my compost bin and I accidentally dropped some on the ground. Later I noticed a bunch of little birds pecking at the ground. I was wondering what they were eating. Remembering there were still a few bits of egg shells on the ground from dropping them earlier, I wondered if that’s what they were actually eating. Wow

I add coffee grounds, banana powder and egg shells crushed to my tropical house plants. They love it. Rice water they like too.

Great video !!! Thank you for keeping it simple- so just through my coffee grounds right in my compost bucket with my food scraps

Thanks for sharing and debunking some of the myths. Another effective usage for crushed eggshells are sprinkling them on top of a vermicompost setup (helps improve efficiency of the worms' mechanical abrasion in the guts while digesting food scraps). Also, the banana peels (before or after soaking for a tea) can be subsequently dried, then crushed (like you do with eggshells) for a slow potassium release (especially for people who dont have compost systems).

From a few years of experience, I've gotten the idea that adding a few bits of crushed eggshell along with the other compost I put in the bottom of pots for pepper plants reduces the risk of yellowing leaves. I'm not sure why, and it is only a rough correlation. Of course crows also love to grab eggshells out of my compost bins so they get multiple uses.

You're absolutlely right to debunk daft myths and overstatements. There's a lot of silly stuff out there about gardening. I like the way you keep it simple but very articulate and well informed. Like you say, bang it into the compost and sooner or later it'll all break down and get used. Great stuff! We love it.

I've been using these the wrong way and you've shown me corrective steps to remedy this. Thank you. Excellent advice.

Thank you! My dad kept throwing the egg shells into the flower bed in half pieces. A few days ago i was working in that bed to fix it up and started to crush the shells as much as i could by hand and mix it with the soil

Just about every morning I put my used coffee grounds into my watering can and fill it up with water. Let it set for a few hours and then water as usual.

I am impressed with your gardens. I am going to try planting some veggies this year and certainly need all the help I can find. So thank you for your info. First time I have seen your video.

I have an old plastic coffee can under the sink that receives all the daily coffee grounds, egg shells and banana peels. When it is full, I take it outside and dump it in one particular perennial bed for about a year, each scatter it in a different spot in the bed. In winter it goes right on top of the snow. (I'm in zone 6A in Western NY state.) In summer, I chop it up after tossing it, with a flat bladed shovel and work it into the soil so it doesn't show. The soil becomes loose and worms just love it! Critters have never been a problem and in warm months, being in the ground, not just on it, there is no smell. I've also taken to burying vegetable scraps such as carrot, potato, squash peelings and onion as well. I always bury that, as I don't need more bunnies than already pass through the yard.

Another one for egg shells is to mix with vinegar and sit overnight. This makes calcium more bioavailable

Thank you for taking such a calm approach to gardening, I always wonder about the cost/benefit of putting too much energy (electrical and my own!) into breaking things down to use in special ways in the garden. Anything biological will eventually degrade by itself :) I like your channel Thanks

I definitely like the smoothie idea for soaking chopped up banana peels and powdered egg shells. I also put the eggshells in a birdhouse for the birds. When I had a cockatiel, I was told they must have shells in order to make their own eggs.

I was very impressed by the way you spoke and provided me with very useful information. Thank you

I used banana peel "tea" as you put it for my spider plant the other and it perked right up. Leaves definitely got a lot greener. Have also added coffee grounds from time to time as suggested just a little sprinkle on top and they seem to do the job too. Never tried the egg shells but sense birds like em as they "swallow" grit to help them "chew" and calcium's good for them too. Good video just subscribed :)

I have been composting for 14 years, and I just dump everything in a cement block bin with a cover. I get 5 gallon buckets of coffee grounds from the coffee shop down the street, (but not lately!) and dump that in. The eggshells go in, and banana peels too. Everything veggie from the kitchen, and grass from some people who don't use chemicals on their lawns. At the end of the summer I start a new pile in the next bin. I turn it several times a year, forking it all into a wheelbarrow and a big tub, and put it back in. In the spring, when I am ready to use it, I screen it, and it is beautiful! Very few eggshell pieces remain. The husk of the mango seeds remain, but the part inside has dissolved. Avocado pits are indestructible, unless you smash them, I don't have the time.

What I do is just to put all of them together in my compost pile with grass clippings, etc, and they provide me with a perfect soil mix esp for my container gardening. Of course still mix them with other resources like manures and fertilizers to boost my plants, and found great results. Great episodes and enjoy watching...

Best explanation to debunk the myths of organic composting for plants. Great video and keep up the great work.

I appreciate this... just COMPOST those items and THEN use the soil derived from them in your garden.

Im surprised you didnt mention blending eggshells for grit in the worm bins. Thats what i do and works great!

Wow informative. I appreciate the knowledge of how eggshells taking longer to breakdown. Coffee grounds being able to be sprinkled throughout garden great to know. Very informative much thanks

I really appreciate your science-based approach!

Thanks for the end tip on keeping it simple! It can be to be tough to not over complicate. Gardening should be fun (:

Coffee grounds help against aphids. 6 weeks in and I can confirm this.

I love these video hack breakdowns. I have seen so many videos showing 5 minute hacks that are not always true. It’s just click bait. Thanks for the honesty. I love your content and love your videos. Keep it up!

I always use coffee grounds & egg shells in a lot of my plants& I get great results most plants do love coffee grinds I save them after every cup of coffee it’s the best& for inside plants also😊

I wash my egg shells after cracking. Then soak the shells in a tiny cup with a spritz of vinegar to sterilize. Rinse well with clear water, smash and freeze in a Tupperware container. Then when I brew a pot of coffee I add a layer of egg shell to my paper coffee filter, then add the coffee grounds. After this I discard the grounds and shells into a large handled bin with dirt in the garage. My husband also adds sawdust from his unpainted wood projects. Occasionally i add banana peels chopped up into the bin the day I use the dirt. I don't add any food because we store the bin of dirt in the garage. It is mixed with other dirt when I need to fill pots or plant anything in the ground. My flower beds that were poor sandy soil now are rich and has hundreds of worms whenever you dig in my beds! And the egg shells in my coffee are to remove the acid from the coffee and give me some calcium to improve my bones. Win, win situation.

I have one rule for compost, if it was alive, it goes in the pile. Everything from grass clippings, sticks from the yard, pet waste, kitchen waste to shredded paper is going to break down into humus. It doesn't take a chemistry degree to let things rot naturally.

I am putting all of them in my compost bins. Great info in all your videos.

Can't thank you enough for these amazing videos. Love love love.

Worms do backflips when you put coffee grounds in your worm farm lmfao

I boil the egg shells and the water cools..then I water my tomatoes with it. ^^ The hard shells go as filler in the bottom of my next pot.

Thank you! Appreciated the info. Real information is the best! Long life and prosperity to your channel.

Such good narration. A fine job! Thanks.

Coffeegrounds: i use them to regulate something in the soil. It helps lots of plants germinate (I have proof from this year) and cats don’t like walking over it. And hate ants hate it, so they will move. And it breaks down within a month in wet soil without worms. Eggshells : mulch. Just mulch or as gravel mixed in the soil. Breaks down in a few years. I dry them and crunch them in the mortar and pestle Bananapeels: I leave them on top of the soil. Or dig them in just under the top. Springtails love it, so do pillbugs. Also plants are known to shoot their roots towards and into the peel. (At least in my garden) I tested that. And instead of bananapeels you can use avocado peels too.

Banana peel can be dried and then pulverized (use a blender) into a powder and then sprinkled on the plants. I've been doing this for years and my plants love it. I happen to have a dehydrator to use for the drying; but one could just as easily dry them outside, or put them in the oven on a low temp until they're dry enough to grind up in the blender.

I use coffee grounds and egg shells in soil of plants. Banana peels in soil of roses, helps them bloom.

Love the garden you have! I too use raised garden beds.

All three disappear in my compost. Occasionally, I find a missed sticker from a banana or cutie in my raised garden when I'm turning the soil, but everything else becomes beautiful black soil.

I use “banana tea” to water my houseplants and I find it makes them perk up and grow much quicker. I have a jade plant that I transplanted 4 months ago and it has already grown about 3”. My mother in law grinds eggshells and puts about 2 Tb of the powder in with each tomato seedling … she rarely has blossom rot on her tomatoes.

Hi Kevin! This was really interesting! Thank you for sharing!

love this was suggested to me as a fan of The Garden, since they have songs named Banana Peel and Egg

Can’t wait to start using these in my garden! 💖🥰

my dad did the egg shells our hole back yard was Green he grew everything 😁 my dad mixed left over food it worked on all his plants. beautiful memories i have Dad sure had a green finger.❤❤❤❤

Shredding egg shells in a coffee grinder refuses the shells to a powder fine consistency which is wonderful to add when I’m making Mel’s mix😉!! Thanks so much for covering these things to add for our gardens and building great soil for our 🌱 plants!!

Hey Kevin, I'm looking into home gardening and found your channel to be a wonderful source of information and I want to thank you for your time and effort. I would like to ask would blending the banana peel be a good idea or no? I'm thinking that blending the peel along with like the egg shells and such to make a kind of shake for the plants

Love that you're wearing Uncle Jim's Worm Farm shirt. I just ordered my worms and can't wait to get them. lol

Thanks for sharing this wonderful information. You are the best teacher.

Thanks for the great information. I just used the egg shell powder and waiting to check the results.👍👍👍

Powdered egg shells are a good addition to a worm bin. I had trouble getting my worms to produce very fast so I started making a powder with egg shells and sprinkling that in with their feedings. Now I have more worms than I know what to do with and am always giving them away. The calcium is needed for worms to reproduce, and it also acts as a source of grit for them to digest the other food scraps in the worm bin, in addition to adding calcium to the castings that will be used back in the garden.

I can’t speak to these items specifically, but, I send ALL of my scraps through my vitamix with some water and dump that in to a bucket that I keep outside the kitchen... when the bucket is full (and yes, decomposing fast!) I dump it in to my red worm bag along with cardboard, paper etc... I also include eggshells in this, too... the red worms blow through a 5 gallon bucket every week. Amazingly this gives me maybe 1/4 to 1/5 of that mass in castings. Those worms know what they’re doing.

Superb video as always. Learnt a lot and enjoyed the tips in our garden as well.

I try to use all 3 in the garden, too! But you often mention your worm bed. Could you do a video (or refer me to one) on the benefits of worms, the best way/place to get them, best type of bed, feed them & then how best to use them? Thank you!

I'm such a rank beginner, but thus far my best success with composting anything -- banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, and basically everything else -- has been from chucking it in a blender with some water and turning it into a slurry. I freeze the slurry in my freezer until my worms need feeding. Pro tip, learned from CSI back in the day: When you freeze anything and then thaw it out, it rots in proportion to how long it's been frozen. If you've frozen something for a couple of hours, it won't make much difference, but if you forget about it in the back of the freezer for a year or more, you'll see it rots really really fast. Worms don't eat compost. They eat the bacteria that break down the compost. So the faster the bacteria work, the sooner my worms get to eat! When I'm feeding the worms, I toss in my handful or two of browns (shredded toilet paper tubes and egg cartons, usually), then dump the thawed slurry right on top of that, and add another handful of (soaked) browns on top of that. Now I'm getting good compost in about a quarter of the time I used to -- and I don't have to go through it and pick out all the uncomposted peels and shells and stuff, because there isn't any.

5:00 - dry first then crush them up! i like this idea! thumbs up

Been following your videos for a bit now and I listen to your podcast. Thank you for sharing all the great knowledge. I’m a New Yorker living in the West Midlands of England and I have a rather large allotment in a farm and I have been going at the garden for over a year now like an animal. The garden is a marvel to be in and look at but it’s overwhelming at times and jobs are always needing to be done. I’m finding out this year (my first year growing a garden of this magnitude) what I would do differently already. But the mistakes I’m making are good learning experiences. Next year is going to be amazing!

Great info! I am learning so much from your channel about gardening! I am wondering, what if you put your egg shells, coffee grounds and banana peels in a blender with some water and blend it all up then add it to your soil, will that be beneficial? I am assuming the nutrients will be very readily available that way.