Container Hacks

Once, after a successful cookout, I was pouring the dregs from glasses of beers and wine down the kitchen drain. 

- Frank Hyman

From a stint in local government I knew that the nutrients in these dregs would wind up in someone's drinking water reservoir and could contribute to algae blooms and fish kills.

Why was I pouring perfectly good nutrients down the drain? Why not pour them in a pitcher, leave them out for a day or two so the alcohol could evaporate, then dilute with water and irrigate my container plants with this free, liquid plant fertilizer? That’s what happens now at our house with any liquids that used to go down the drain such as leftover coffee or pasta water. The amount of nutrients may be less than found in a commercial liquid fertilizer, but it’s free. And it doesn’t fill up a drinking water reservoir or septic tank.

Creating commercial liquid fertilizer requires using fossil fuels. And that puts more carbon dioxide into the air, which contributes to climate disruption: hotter summers, longer droughts, harsher winters, etc. The weather is already a challenging enough element of gardening without us rocking the climatological boat.

But most important, my container plants seem to like these kitchen dregs. Just be sure to let the alcohol evaporate. You don’t want any tipsy plants wreaking havoc in the house!

Potting Media

When it’s time to repot plants, we could buy a bag of potting media. But that means that someone had to mine ancient peat moss. Those peat bogs are stable carbon sinks. So when we stick it in pots, it eventually breaks down and adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere which contributes to climate disruption. Some folks like to debate this issue, but even the U.S. military has been focused on addressing climate disruption for almost a decade. And who wants to be on the wrong side of the U.S. military? I don’t.