Potassium fertiliser made using banana skins or whole bananas too squidgy to eat! Three ways of releasing the potassium:
- Place banana skins into buckets of water and cover with a lid. The resulting liquid is a very excellent if somewhat smelly fertiliser; the rotten skins go into the compost
- Chop up skins and fork into the soil where the potassium will be released slowly
- Thirdly, dry skins in the oven which can then be used whole or crushed into a powder with a used cereal inner and rolling pin and sprinkled onto the soil
Use on fruiting plants such as tomatoes as soon as the first flowers appear and fortnightly thereafter to encourages the plant to concentrate on producing fruit rather than foliage. Roses love potassium too so place around the roots for larger longer lasting blooms.
Banana Bread
Should you wish to make the homemade high potassium fertiliser from banana skins you need the skins so I thought I would share this recipe.
There are as many recipes for banana bread or cake depending upon your thoughts as there are cake recipe books. This one was given to me by a WI member friend too many years ago to remember when we made many to sell for charity. Over the years I reduced the amount of sugar and varied the extract used but the recipe still succeeds.
Obviously to show you a finished bread I needed to make one which pleased my family no end!
Ingredients
125g warmed butter
250g castor sugar (I about 100g less sugar and have substituted demerara when no castor was found in the larder!)
3-4 ripe bananas
2 large eggs
2 capfuls vanilla extract (or almond extract)
250g plain flour
3 teasp baking powder
Method
Preheat oven to 160°C/gas mark 3
Grease and line a loaf or baking tin with greaseproof paper
Beat butter and sugar together with wooden spoon or mixer until combined to a paste, less than a creamed method
Mix in bananas, eggs and extract, a lumpy wet mix happens
Mix flour and baking powder together and fold in carefully with a metal spoon until no flour is visible. The mixture will still be lumpy but that is all good
Pour into tin, smooth top
Bake 40-60 minutes
Leave in tin for few minutes to cool then cool on wire rack
Enjoy fresh but should any survive more than a few days eat with ice cream!