Everyone knows that water is the most widespread drink in the world, and in the second place of honor, of course, is tea. Someone loves black leaf, someone in bags, someone green with additives. As the saying goes, "to taste and color ..." But not everyone knows what tea is drunk, and even more so that it can be used as fertilizer.
What is useful in tea leaves?
For more than three thousand years, tea has been considered a medicinal drink. Only recently began to drink it everywhere just for fun. In China, tea is still considered a cure for all diseases, it is very reverent and respectful of this culture. Tea leaves have a very high content of fluorides, polyphenols, vitamins A, C, E, P, thein, pectin. About thirty minerals are included in the tea leaf: potassium, manganese, fluorine, zinc, chromium and many others. Tea leaves are a real storehouse of nutrients.
The second life of tea bags
Do you think a disposable tea bag ? You may be surprised, but this is not so. How to use slept tea in a bag? There are many ways to use:
- in the refrigerator, it will eliminate the unpleasant odor;
- lotion on the eyes - from puffiness and dark circles;
- minor burns;
- fat-free dishes;
- add flavor to cereals;
- soften hard meat;
- scare away mosquitoes;
- and even remove rust!
Benefit gardeners
But the most important amazing ability - tea is very useful for a personal plot, gardeners without it are nowhere to go!
If your family is lovers and connoisseurs of this drink, then during the winter period you should accumulate enough tea leaves to use on your site during planting work. Very often this happens: seeds are purchased of high quality, seedlings are planted as expected, timely care, weeding, watering, and there is still no crop. The summer residents give up, they can not find the reason. And the reason is sometimes simple - "heavy" soil. Heavy - because it has a clay structure, poorly transmitting light, water and air. In this regard, the plants coke and wither, no matter how you take care. If you encounter such a problem - sleeping tea to help you! It will help to dilute and loosen heavy soil, saturate it with nitrogen, fortify and retain moisture.
How to prepare sleeping tea leaves for use?
After tea drinking we take a strainer and squeeze tea leaves as much as possible. If the tea was brewed bagged, the principle is the same - squeeze. Now we lay out the tea leaves on a flat plate or tray - depending on the quantity and convenience. At night, the tea leaves dry, and in the morning it can be transferred to a container (it is very convenient to store it in a plastic container with a lid). By this principle, we collect all the tea we have drunk during the entire "non-urban" period - the more the better. The most important thing is to make sure that the tea is unsweetened. If sugar does get into the tea leaves, then before drying it should be thoroughly washed in at least two waters, and then squeezed and laid out for drying.
How to use drunk tea in the garden to increase productivity?
There are several applications, consider some:
- Make compost. This is the easiest way to use it effectively - just add the tea you have drunk to a pile of compost, pour it with warm water and cover with foil for a couple of days. Tea will enrich your compost with useful microelements, because sleeping tea leaves are a natural source of nitrogen. Due to the content of tannins, tea leaves activate the decomposition process, therefore, your compost will cross over much faster. If you have a flower garden on the shady side, then it’s very good to wipe the leaves of the plants with the used tea bags. Thus, you feed the flowers, and also clean the leaves from dust.
- Fertilizer for the soil. If you have already planted your seedlings, feeding it is quite simple: add a tea bag to each trunk of the plant. Gradually decomposing, sleeping tea will saturate the soil with nitrogen. This is an environmentally friendly fertilizer with a prolonged action. Together with the tea leaves it will not hurt to drip a little ash. Well, if you have not planted your seedlings, then the actions are: dry the tea leaves, mix with ash and pour a pinch into each hole. After that, we already add the seedlings. There is one caveat: tea leaves should be sugar free, otherwise you will then get rid of the hordes of ants.
- Tea pills. If you are used to growing your seedlings in peat pots, tea bags will be an excellent substitute for you. Just open the tea bag, cut off the top with the bracket, add earth to it, plant the seed and cover with a film until emergence. After the sprout appears, you can plant it directly in this bag. This type of planting will help protect the roots of the plant, avoiding transplantation, and will feed each root throughout the growing season. This type of landing is very suitable for pepper, as it is very painful for diving.
- Supersoil. Drunk tea in the garden (especially leafy) is an excellent, and most importantly, low-cost tool for improving and enriching the soil of the garden, because tea leaves make the soil more loose, and therefore more breathable and moisture permeable. Recommended proportions for landscaping: half a kilo of tea leaves per square meter of the garden.
- 5. Mulching. If you want to retain moisture on the topsoil, just make mulch from the tea leaves. It will be useful especially for hygrophilous plants. In addition to retaining moisture, the mulch will saturate the plant with nitrogen, supporting the life of the upper layer. Just do not need to sprinkle the plants with wet tea leaves, it will mold very quickly and suffocate, thereby attracting squads of midges and wood lice, adding to your headache in search of means to get rid of living creatures. Mulch has another huge plus: no weeds grow under it. So the weed will have much less. Just do not forget to loosen the mulch in order to avoid the formation of mold. If the mulch is still moldy and the insects began to swarm, then there is only one way out - remove it and replace it with a new one.
What conclusions can be drawn? Is sleeping tea a fertilizer?
There is no definite answer. Someone is very fond of and constantly uses drunk tea as a top dressing for their site, someone considers this method to be very time-consuming and ineffective. As with any method, there are pros and cons. Let's analyze - what more?
pros
These include:
- drunk tea does not need to be bought; it just needs to be carefully accumulated and stored until spring;
- as a means of caring for houseplants - an excellent option, since the number of houseplants is much less than any garden plot;
- welding perfectly dilutes and loosens clay soil, facilitates the access of water and oxygen to the root system of plants;
- Tea bags are a great budget replacement for peat pills.
Minuses
Among them:
- if you have a large plot, you will have to drink a lot of tea (we remember the calculation of half a kilo of tea leaves per square meter of land);
- the tea leaves should be very well dried, otherwise the whole tea jar will mold in the process of accumulation;
- you need to make sure that sugar does not in any way fall into drunk tea, otherwise you will have to keep the defense from all sorts of insects. Well, in principle, and all the cons.
So, what conclusion can be drawn? Does sleeping tea need fertilizer in the country? Only you decide! Have a good gardening!