The Banana Peel Gardening Hack People Need To Stop Believing

These days, we are all constantly awash in a sea of "tips and tricks" that promise to improve our lives with little to no effort. Whether it's a listicle of old-school kitchen hacks or a short-form video on social media promising to double your tomato yield with one simple and inexpensive addition, it can be hard to keep track of it all. With the general trend toward clickbait-style media, where the outlet or producer may be more focused on getting your attention than on sharing anything of real value, there are more and more questionable practices entering the mainstream. Gardening has always been an area with a fair amount of superstition and pseudo-science mixed in with the real data-driven suggestions, but there is one trend that it is time for home horticulturalists to let go of: banana peel water.

If you haven't seen any of the myriad articles and social media posts promoting this idea, it is a simple one. The basic idea is that you can use banana peels as fertilizer for your garden simply by soaking them in water for a while and then using the "tea" to water your garden or houseplants. Plenty of people claim that this works, though, as with many online "hacks," the results are typically anecdotal. People will, for example, say that their plants look healthier, but there's no data to back it up, and between confirmation bias and people's endless desire for internet attention, there are far too many confounding variables to give these statements much credence.

Now, there is no reason to think that banana peel water would be bad for your plants — excluding the introduction of pesticides used in conventional banana farming — but there is no real scientific reason to believe that it is good for them either. There are, of course, lots of nutrients in bananas, which can be very helpful to soil health for your plants, but this method just doesn't get to them. You can toss overripe bananas in the garden as a soil amendment, which will release nutrients into the soil as they decompose. However, tossing banana peels in water for a few hours or a few days simply does not give them time to release many nutrients. 

The water may be slightly better for your plants than plain tap water, but there is really no evidence to support this claim. It is most likely, as it seems at first glance, simply too good to be true. We all wish that we had a tangible use for our kitchen scraps, and banana water hangs that mirage out for us. In truth, these scraps are very useful, but you need to do more than soak them in water. You need to compost them.

Decomposition, as happens when organic materials like banana peels are composted, is a much slower process than making banana water. But, unlike the social-media-ready bowl of chopped banana peels, the benefits of composting at home are backed up by endless data. With a decent setup, you can turn not just banana peels, but all of your kitchen scraps, into amazing fertilizer for your garden — and it really works.