GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

22-06-2003, 12:44 AM

(Joanne) wrote in message . com...
Colin Malsingh wrote in message . ..

I'm sorry? Bananas?

Now I've heard everything! Sorry to sound sceptical but how about
ordinary plant food?

Colin
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(Please reply via the newsgroup)

Bananas = Potassium. They are easy to get your hands on, cheap and
breakdown easily in the soil. I picked up the suggestion on this same
newsgroup a few years ago and found that it works very well, try it.

Finally, I garden organically, one suggests what one uses.

jc

p.s. Hopeing that this does not get posted twice. Google had some
problems during my first attempt. If it is, sorry to sound repetative.

While being organic myself, I always think it is foolish to waste food
for fertilization purposes. Wood ash has far more K than bananas, for
example, and kitchen scraps in general provide large amounts of K per
unit of weight. The myth that bananas are ubersources of K was pushed
by the banana industry in the first place. Potatoes or cantaloupes or
watermelon or most stone fruits or oranges have just as much (check
the USDA site for a nutrient breakdown of foods). Green vegetables
have amounts that are typically within a factor two of bananas. Cow
manure is 2% dry weight K.

And a rich source of K are tomatoes themselves, with several hundred
mg of K per tomato (1 tomato=1 banana). Without a doubt tomatoes can
exhaust the K supply of soil rapidly, but saving your kitchen scraps
during the winter and spring in a spare trash can will provide much
more K than a dozen sliced bananas. I use a couple of trash cans of
kitchen scraps for 20 tomatos and a handful of wood ash for each plant
(my soil is acid). I then mulch with wood chips, themselves a good K
provider at 200 ppm and a water equalizer for plants that need to
avoid water stress (if I did not have them I would use leaves). You
don't need more than that for your tomatoes to thrive, and you will
not have to waste food.