Quiz: 7 Surprising Things Hiding in Your Kitchen That Your Garden Will Love

[TEG Project Manager]

Ever feel like you’re constantly buying fertilizers and garden products… while perfectly good stuff is sitting right in your kitchen?​

Yep. Your trash can might actually be a treasure chest. Before you toss those scraps, let’s see how many everyday kitchen items secretly double as garden helpers. Grab a cup of coffee and play along. No pressure. Just for fun.

Can you guess which ones help your garden and which ones don’t?

Questions​

1. Used coffee grounds can help improve your soil.
A) True
B) False

2. Crushed eggshells can protect plants from pests like slugs and snails.
A) True
B) False

3. Banana peels are packed with nutrients that plants love.
A) True
B) False

4. Leftover cooking water from boiled vegetables should always be poured down the drain.
A) True
B) False

5. Plain cardboard from food boxes can be used in the garden.
A) True
B) False

6. Cinnamon from your spice rack can help stop plant diseases.
A) True
B) False

7. Rice water (the cloudy water after rinsing rice) has zero benefits for plants.
A) True
B) False

Take your guesses before scrolling. No peeking.

Answers (No cheating!)​

1. True
Coffee grounds add organic matter and small amounts of nitrogen. Worms love them too. Think of it like a morning snack for your soil.

2. True
Crushed eggshells create sharp edges that slow down soft-bodied pests like slugs. Plus they add calcium. Double win.

3. True
Banana peels are rich in potassium and phosphorus. Great for flowers and fruiting plants like tomatoes and peppers.

4. False
Let the water cool and pour it on your plants. It contains leftover nutrients from the veggies. Free fertilizer, basically.

5. True
Plain cardboard makes awesome weed barriers and sheet mulch. Lay it down, cover with compost, and boom. Fewer weeds, happier soil.

6. True
Cinnamon has natural antifungal properties. Sprinkle a little on seedling soil or cuttings to help prevent damping-off disease.

7. False
Rice water contains starches and small nutrients that can feed soil microbes. Those microbes help your plants grow stronger.

---

​

How Did You Do?​

7 correct
Kitchen wizard. You basically run a secret garden lab at home.

5 to 6 correct
Solid garden instincts. Your compost pile is probably smiling right now.

3 to 4 correct
Not bad at all. You just discovered a few new tricks to try this season.

0 to 2 correct
Hey, we all start somewhere. Now you’ve got seven free garden hacks ready to go.

---

Next time you’re about to throw something away, pause for a second and think, “Could my garden use this?” You might be surprised how often the answer is yes.

So tell us… which of these are you already using, and which one are you excited to try first?

 

[flowerbug]

hmm, well, we use instant coffee so no grounds, we don't normally cook vegetables in a lot of water and we don't rinse rice.

our blights and fungi kill off the weaklings (ok, i'm just making that one up ), we have bacterial spot issues here or there, i'm not too worried about them being major problems enough that i would go out and put something on plants.

unfortunately i cannot get Mom to save eggshells from when she's baking and she also keeps putting them in the cardboard egg cartons so those can't be recycled. when i peel hard boiled eggs i do keep the shells and put them in the gardens eventually, but it's not that often i do that as i don't eat eggs much at all other than in baked goodies.

i do use cardboard to smother weeds - it works well if done right (a few overlapping layers and some mulch on top to hold it all down).

banana peels are worm snacks for sure. i keep all vegetable and fruit scraps to go into the worm buckets or into the gardens and dry most of them before they go into the worm buckets. the process of drying them helps make them soft when they rehydrate in the worm buckets. drying them also reduces how much moisture ends up in the worm buckets. you don't want a lot of extra going in there as it can get pretty soggy (if you don't have a drainhole for worm tea - i don't put holes in the buckets i use) but it also helps the worms digest the food scraps faster because of how drying them out makes the cell walls of the food scraps softer when they do rehydrate. for things like pieces of potatoes, carrot tops, garlic bottoms, etc. it speeds up the process by quite a bit.

 

[akroberts]

7 for 7. I try to keep things in the house for the garden.

 

[GardenManiac]

I'm pretty sure the eggshell thing is an old wives tale. I tried it once and it did not work.

 

[flowerbug]

I'm pretty sure the eggshell thing is an old wives tale. I tried it once and it did not work.

nothing is 100% guaranteed, but as a similar example i have gardens surrounded by crushed-rinsed limestone pathways and they rarely have any slug issues. i still won't recommend it for use because once it gets some dirt in it it is hard to keep the weeds from wanting to start growing in it until you screen it to remove the dirt (and it is a lot of work).

for places you don't walk on or have wind or water flowing across it's a great mulch, put it down deep enough, don't let junk collect on it... don't have trees or shrubs around the edges. if you put a good layer of weed barrier underneath it (i suggest that in some areas to let water through but mostly you want as thick of a barrier as you can get in as it will last longer if it is thicker) it will be good for 30 years or more (we're going on 30 years in some spots here).