Is The Banana Soup Soil Booster Trick Worth Trying?

A hack that converts old food into a supposed soil booster has become quite popular for its convenience, but it may not be as effective as promised. The hack is quite simple and promises to repurpose your food scraps, as all you need is water, two banana peels, three egg shells, and ground cinnamon. The resulting soup is meant to be poured over your old potting soil and stirred thoroughly. After 24 hours, your soil is supposedly rejuvenated with nutrients and ready for your next plant. Unfortunately, this soup may not be the cure that gardeners hope it is, contributing very little to help your garden.

This hack can be appealing for gardeners because it is a cheap way to help your soil while reducing waste. And there are, indeed, effective fertilizer teas that provide liquid nutrients to your garden. Additionally, the hack is quick and easy. To make the soup, you just need to boil the banana peels in water for about 10 minutes, blend the resulting water with crushed egg shells and cinnamon, then let the mixture cool completely. Mix it into your soil and enjoy all that added potassium and phosphorous that leached out of the bananas into the water. It seems to be a natural way to use waste and help your soil. And while it's not considered harmful by most experts, it may not actually be doing anything to enhance your soil.

The banana soup hack will not harm your soil, but it might not provide any meaningful benefits. While there are nutrients in banana peels and egg shells (potassium, phosphorous, and calcium, primarily), both take much longer to decompose, if you're just burying them in your soil, before they can provide those nutrients to your plants. Additionally, the water itself will not have extracted enough nutrients to be of any difference to normal water. Some banana water recipes call for soaking the peels for several days rather than boiling it, which is intended to expedite the process. But there's not much evidence that happens. That being said, cinnamon works wonders in your garden as a mold fighter and will be beneficial to your plants, but it may be best to apply cinnamon to your soil in a different manner. Likewise, there are a lot of ways to use banana peels in your garden, including making a dried, powdered fertilizer, or as bait in your insect traps.

A better use for your food scraps is to compost them. You can compost almost all organic material except meat and cooked food, and this compost will significantly help your soil. Compost adds more organic matter than the banana soup and the nutrients will be much more readily available too, as food scraps will already be broken down. Compost makes your soil healthier and can improve the resilience of your plants. The best part is, composting is easily done even if you're short on time and space.