Tomatoes and strawberries are two of the most common fruits to grow in your garden, but it can be disheartening when their fruits don’t ripen well. To ensure your tomatoes and strawberries thrive, it's crucial to understand the proper fertilisation techniques that will lead to a bountiful harvest of succulent fruits during the warmer months. Gardeners have the option to bypass commercial fertilisers in favour of natural scrap items to boost their plants’ growth. 

Taking to their gardening blog, Our Nook of the Woods, Rosslyn Kemerer has shared how to make your own organic liquid fertiliser. Sharing a photo of the product on her website, the gardener called it “gardener’s liquid gold fertiliser”. Rosslyn said: “While Miracle Grow or other store-bought liquid fertilisers might be convenient, have you ever considered making your own liquid fertiliser for free?”

With a little know-how, a bucket and some water, you can create extremely nutrient-dense and bioavailable liquid fertiliser, often called compost tea.

The gardener explained: “Making ‘tea’ can be as simple or as complex as you want it, based on what you have available and how much you’re hoping to make. Pretty much any type of green leaf or weed stores useful nutrients that will break down when soaked in water.”

The three main ingredients in store-bought fertilizer are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK). Nitrogen encourages leaf growth, phosphorus promotes root growth, and potassium encourages plants to bloom and produce better fruit.

Tomato and strawberry plants rely heavily on potassium, and there are two scrap items Rosslyn highlighted that fit this criteria - dandelions and banana peels.

To create your fertiliser concentrate, use a five-gallon bucket with a lid and pack it with banana peels and dandelions. 

You can weigh the materials down with a rock if you’d like. Cover the top with filtered or rainwater and add a loose-fitting lid. 

Rosslyn urged: “Do not use any water that contains chlorine as it will kill off many of the microorganisms and nutrients you are trying to encourage.

Allow the mixture to soak for anywhere from three days to three weeks. The longer, the better if you would like to extract the most nutrients. 

After a week, as the natural items rot more, the mixture should look very dark or black and will smell bad. 

When you’re ready to use it, strain out the organic matter and bury the waste in your garden or compost it.

If you would like to use it early, after three days, you can use it straight without diluting. 

If you have left it for a week, dilute it at a ratio of one part tea to eight parts water. After two weeks or more, the concentrate should be diluted at a ratio of one to 15.