Making compost from household waste is an immensely satisfying experience. It gives you the chance to do your bit towards reducing environmental pollution. But the problem with compost is that it takes around 3 to 4 months to get ready for use. And you have to wait till the process of composting is over. You can’t use it before that. So when you’ve just started out in gardening like I have just done, you need a standby arrangement.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting video on how to make organic fertiliser from banana peels. All you need to do is sun-dry the peels and then grind them in your own mixer-grinder. You can use this powder right away. It looked so easy, so I tried it out myself. Here are the steps along with the photos.

1. First gather all the sun-dried banana peels. They should be hard and brittle. Then only will they be easy to grind. If they are soft, keep them back in the sun again for some more time.

2. Put the banana peels in the grinder jar of your mixer. 

3. Grind the peels into a coarse powder. It’s okay if you still see a few tiny pieces of the peels.

4. Store the powder in a jar.

Excitedly, I dropped a teaspoonful of this coarsely ground powder into each one of my 20 flower pots. Two weeks later, the plants looked noticeably happier and healthier than before.

But the use of the same fertiliser each time does not always work, say gardening experts. So I made powders from the sund-dried peels of many other items. Now I have a collection of jars of these powders. I have labelled them neatly to avoid mixing them up. I use them alternatively every fortnight in my pots. 

I also keep track of which one I have used each time by duly recording it in an MS Excel file. To ensure that I use the fertilisers regularly, I have kept the 15th and 30th of every month as my in-house ‘fertiliser days.’

Jasbir Chatterjee

The best time to make your collection of fertilisers is when the sun is out for a longer duration. If you are drying the peels during the monsoon, you need to be extra alert. As soon as it becomes cloudy, bring the peels inside. If they become soaked in the rain, they carry the risk of rotting and drying them takes a much, much longer time. Always keep the peels spread on a newspaper as it soaks up the moisture and speeds up the drying process.

You can use these compost powders in hydroponic gardening also by dissolving them in water. 

For your benefit, I am giving you the link to the video I referred to earlier in this post and which flagged off my dry fertiliser-making journey.

Jasbir Chatterjee, a postgraduate in Mathematics from Delhi University, who has also done an MBA, works as a Manager in Delhi, where she lives with her daughter and husband, who is a theatre artiste.  Her hobby is writing, which she began at age 15.