Home gardening hacks:15 surprising household items that you can use as fertilizers

12. Blood Meal

Much like bone meal, the name says it all where blood meal is concerned. Again, this natural fertilizer generally comes as a byproduct of beef production.

Despite its honest but disconcerting name, blood meal is an excellent natural fertilizer that’s stood the test of time. Nitrogen is the main nutrient found in blood meals, making it an easy fix for nutrient-depleted soil.

You can add a blood meal to your soil after growing heavy nitrogen-consuming plants such as tomatoes, pepper, cucumbers, leafy greens, and squash. Adding it at the beginning of the season provides a slow release of nitrogen throughout the growing season.

It has the added benefit of deterring some common veggie-nibbling pests with its scent. So keep a bag handy to sprinkle around the perimeter of your garden too.

13. Banana Peel Fertilizer

While you could toss your banana peels directly in your compost bin, you might want to toss them in a jar with some water instead.

Homemade banana peel fertilizer gives you a potassium-rich liquid feed containing important trace elements – calcium, manganese, sulfur, and magnesium. These are all nutrients that control vital systems in a plant’s life cycle.

Again, use it for your garden and your houseplants as a foliar spray or a liquid fertilizer.

The great thing about this particular fertilizer is that you don’t have to have a compost pile to make it. You just need to be someone who eats bananas.

14. Comfrey Liquid Fertilizer

If you find your soil lacks potassium, comfrey fertilizer is the answer. Comfrey is easy to grow and provides the benefit of being a great green mulch and its use as a fertilizer.

Much like compost and worm tea, comfrey fertilizer is made by soaking the chopped comfrey leaves in water and then siphoning off the water once an appropriate amount of time has passed.

You can add this potassium booster to your regular watering routine or use it as a foliar spray. Again, this liquid fertilizer is great for houseplants as well.

Tomato growers rejoice; we haven’t forgotten you. I’ve saved this particular fertilizer for last because it does require several natural ingredients to mix up a batch. However, it’s got a track record of over 30 years of feeding tomatoes behind it.

As any tomato grower will tell you, tomatoes are heavy feeders. It seems as though you can never give them enough nutrients – mainly nitrogen and phosphorus.

And you’ll see that this homemade concoction provides plenty of both. Be sure and mix up a batch and grow the best tomatoes of your gardening career.

As I said initially, this is hardly an exhaustive list of your natural fertilizer options. But you’ll certainly be well on your way to a glorious yield if you incorporate a few of these into your growing season.

And who knows, within a year or two, you may have worked out the perfect fertilizer routine and never have to rely on synthetic fertilizers again.