How to use eggshells and tea leaves to fertilize plants

Wow, it's been more than 2 months since I last posted!  I've been super busy the past couple of months and even if I've wanted to write a lot of things in the past, I had to practice some self-discipline.  I've made a resolution before that when I have very little spare time and it's a choice between blogging and getting enough sleep, sleeping would be my priority. No contest.  Haha...

My blog backlogs have piled up.  I've yet to write about my London adventure in October (before I start forgetting the details) and an unexpected trip to India in November.

Anyway, I'll start with the short and easy backlogs first.

I recently found out from a friend that you could use eggshells and tea leaves as fertilizer.  I regularly consume eggs and drink tea so it's perfect for me. At least they'll serve a better purpose than just throwing them away.

For the eggshells, all you need to do is to crush the eggshells.  The finer/powdery it is, the easier and faster it would decompose.  But if you don't have the time to crush them to a powder form (like me!), it's also ok.  The eggshells would still leach calcium and other nutrients into the soil as they decompose.  

You can can mix the crushed eggshells with the soil or just put the crushed eggshells on top of the soil around the base of the plant to make your plants grow healthy and strong.

For tea leaves, you can just remove the tea bag and add the tea leaves to the soil. Super easy!

My plants do look happy. And one of them just sprouted twins. :)

My friend said he has put a lot of crushed eggshells and tea leaves into the soil and he noticed that the newer baby plants grew faster and are now taller than the older baby plants.  Our conclusion was that with all the crushed eggshells and tea leaves in the pot, it's like the plants are having a buffet everyday.  Haha...

Why we need to start using reusable bags

If you haven’t started using eco-friendly bags, you may want to reconsider using them soon because believe it or not, the world’s consumption rate of plastic bags is a staggering 500 billion annually – or almost 1 million plastic bags per minute. Yikes.

Photo by Stephanie  Ho from Pexels

To produce plastic bags, it requires petroleum and natural gas – both non-renewable resources – and the process produces pollution and creates global warming emissions. (It takes approximately 12 million barrels of oil to produce 100 billion plastic bags.)

Then, when bags are not properly disposed, they could kill animals. In fact, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine animals die annually from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food (mistaken as jellyfish, the sea turtle’s primary food). Plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, resulting to an agonizing death. Cows, goats and other land animals also accidentally ingest plastic bags.

And here’s the most alarming thing - a single plastic bag takes 1,000 years to degrade!!! Just imagine, if you’re shopping 3 to 4 bags of groceries every week, this translates up to 208 plastic bags in a year (excluding plastic bags from fastfood and leisure shopping)! In 5 years, that would translate to over 1,000 plastic bags! Whoa…

I haven’t diligently used my eco-friendly bags before (since I normally reuse the plastic bags as trash bags), but after educating myself on this, I realized that helping minimize the plastic bag consumption by using reusable bags can be our own little way of preserving the environment. We may not be able to totally eliminate consumption (for sure, there will be some unavoidable circumstances like when you go impulse buying!), but helping minimize the consumption at the least for planned purchases would be a good start.