Everyone knows that water is the most common drink in the world, and in the second place of honor, of course, tea. Someone likes black large-leaf, someone in bags, someone green with additives. As the saying goes, "the taste and color…" But not everyone knows what tea is, and even more so that it can be used as a fertilizer.
What is the benefit of tea leaves?
For more than three thousand years, tea has been considered a healing drink. It has only recently been started to be drunk everywhere just for pleasure. In China, tea is still considered a cure for all diseases, they are very reverent and respectful of this culture. Tea leaves have a very high content of fluorides, polyphenols, vitamins A, C, E, P, theine, pectin. Approximately thirty minerals are part of the tea leaf: potassium, manganese, fluorine, zinc, chromium and many others. Tea leaves are a real storehouse of useful substances.
The second life of tea bags
Do you think tea bags are disposableuse? You may be surprised, but it is not. How to use sleeping tea in a bag? There are many uses:
- in the refrigerator, it will get rid of the unpleasant smell;
- lotion on the eyes - from puffiness and dark circles;
- for minor burns;
- degrease dishes;
- adds flavor to cereals;
- tender tough meat;
- repels mosquitoes;
- and even remove rust!
Benefits for gardeners
But the most important amazing ability - tea is very useful for a personal plot, gardeners can't do without it!
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. Very often this happens: quality seeds are purchased, seedlings are planted as expected, care is timely, weeding, watering, but there is still no harvest. Summer residents give up, they cannot find the reason. And the reason is sometimes simple - "heavy" soil. Heavy - because it has a clay structure that poorly transmits light, water and air. In this regard, the plants coke and wither, no matter how you take care of them. If you are faced with such a problem - sleeping tea will help you! It will help dilute and loosen heavy soil, saturate it with nitrogen, fortify and retain moisture.
How to properly prepare a sleeping tea leaves for use?
After drinking tea, take a strainer and squeeze the tea leaves as much as possible. If teabrewed packaged, the principle is the same - we squeeze. Now we lay out the tea leaves on a flat plate or tray - depending on the quantity and convenience. At night, the tea dries out, and in the morning you can transfer it to a container (it is very convenient to store it in a plastic container with a lid). According to this principle, we collect all the sleeping tea during the entire "non-garden" period - the more, the better. The most important thing is to make sure that the tea is unsweetened. If suddenly sugar does get into the tea leaves, then before drying it should be thoroughly washed in at least two waters, and only then squeezed and laid out for drying.
How to use sleeping tea in the garden to increase yields?
There are several applications, let's look at some:
- Make compost. This is the easiest way to use it effectively - just add the discarded tea to the compost pile, pour warm water over it and cover with cling film for a couple of days. Tea will enrich your compost with useful trace elements, 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 overripe much faster. If you have a flower garden on the shady side, then used tea bags are very good for wiping the leaves of the plants. Thus, you will feed the flowers, as well as clean the dust from the leaves.
- Fertilizer for the soil. If you have already planted your seedlings, feeding them is quite simple: dig a tea bag near each plant stem. Gradually decomposing, the sleeping tea will saturate the soil with nitrogen. This is an environmentally friendly fertilizer with a prolonged action. Together with tea leaves, it does not hurt to dig in a little ash. Well, if you have not yet planted your seedlings, then the actions are as follows: dry the sleeping tea leaves, mix with ash and fall asleep a pinch in each hole. After that, we already dig in the seedlings. There is one caveat: tea leaves must be sugar-free, otherwise you will then get rid of hordes of ants.
- Tea tablets. If you are used to growing your seedlings in peat pots, tea bags are a great substitute. Just open a sleeping tea bag, cut off the top with a bracket, add soil to it, plant a seed and cover with a film until shoots appear. After the sprout appears, you can plant it directly in this bag. This type of planting will help protect the roots of the plant, avoid replanting, and will feed each root throughout the growing season. This type of landing is very suitable for pepper, as it is very painful to dive.
- "Super Soil". Sleeping tea in the garden (especially leaf tea) is an excellent, and most importantly, budgetary tool for improving and enriching the garden soil, because tea leaves make the soil looser, and therefore more breathable and moisture permeable. Recommended proportions for improving the soil: half a kilo of sleeping tea leaves per square meter of the garden.
- 5. Mulching. If you want to retain moisture in the top layer of the soil, simply make a mulch with tea leaves. It will be especially useful formoisture loving plants. In addition to retaining moisture, the mulch will saturate the plant with nitrogen, keeping the top layer alive. Just do not need to sprinkle the plants with wet tea leaves, it will become moldy and suffocate very quickly, 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 weeding will be much less. Just remember to loosen the mulch to prevent mold. If the mulch is still moldy and the insects begin 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 suitable as a fertilizer?
There is no definite answer. Someone loves and constantly uses sleeping tea as a top dressing for their plot, someone considers this method very time-consuming and inefficient. As with any method, there are pros and cons. Let's analyze - what more?
Pros
These include:
- sleeping tea does not need to be bought, it just needs to be carefully accumulated and stored until spring;
- as a houseplant care product - a great option, as the number of houseplants is much less than any garden plot;
- welding will perfectly dilute and loosen the clay soil, facilitate the access of water and oxygen to the root system of plants;
- tea bags are a great budget replacement for peattablets.
Cons
Among them:
- if you have a large plot, then you will have to drink a lot of tea (we remember the calculation of half a kilo of fresh tea leaves per square meter of land);
- the tea leaves must be very well dried, otherwise the whole jar of tea will become moldy in the process of accumulation;
- you need to make sure that sugar does not get into the sleeping tea in any case, otherwise you will have to keep the defense against all sorts of insects. Well, in principle, and all the cons.
So, what can we conclude? Do you need sleeping tea as a fertilizer in the country? It's up to you to decide! Happy gardening!
