Kitchen Garden Forum

Have discovered that used teabags are very useful for covering the drainage holes in pots in which I grow my peppers, chillis & aubergines. They prevent the compost from leaching out into the drip trays in which the pots stand, yet surplus water can still run through. By the end of the growing season they have virtually decomposed.

Brilliance, sheer brilliance.

what a fab idea!
I want to know what I can do with mine (Twinings Assam, by the way!).
I fear that my worms might very well get bored with the amount of tea bags they get fed, but I can't bear the thought of wasting them. Given I don't have the room for a compost bin, what can I do with them?

Dear Primrose, do you have a preference to what shape tea-bags you use, i would have thought the pyramid ones would be best.

What are tea bags
We've just gone back to using leaf tea and a teapot. Straight in the compost and no trees need die

Alan

Though I've tried teabags in the bottom of pots before, I often found they formed an impenetrable layer at the bottom.

Maybe I was just doing it wrong. I now don't bother with either teabags or stones and get virtually no compost washing out.


Colin

Hi Alan,
What trees would that be? I suspect that teabags are made of a man made fibre!
JB.

Lynne, you can probably just dig your teabags into little holes in the garden. If you don't have room for a compost bin and they are dug in and covered with earth they'll eventually rot down and disappear in the same way that chopped vegetation dug into runner bean trenches eventually rots down.
In the first year we moved into our current house, before we were organised enough to build a proper compost heap I simply dug all my kitchen peelings and lawn cuttings straight into the earth. Being a new build the soil was not particularly good quality and it certainly didn't seem to do any harm to the first plants I put in.

Johnboy

I just guessed it would have to involve wood. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

Tea bag paper is related to paper found in milk and coffee filters. It is made with a blend of wood and vegetable fibers. The vegetable fiber is bleached pulp abaca hemp, a small plantation tree grown for the fiber, mostly in the Philippines and Colombia. Abaca hemp is the longest/strongest papermaking fiber available, surpassing even Douglas fir. Heat-sealed tea bag paper usually has a heat-sealable thermoplastic such as PVC or polyproplyene, as a component fiber on inner side of the teabag surface.


I'm sticking to the teapot

Alan

Lynne
I also felt that I was putting too many teabags into my compost bin as its very small, so at the end of every two days I slit open the bags and empty the tea into a dish and throw it into the flower border, moving to a different spot every time so I don't get a build up in any one spot.
Like Primrose I also dug a hole in the border and buried my little parcel of veg. peelings all through the winter and they rot down well, no grass cuttings as I got rid of the lawn a few years ago. If there's any cold tea left in the pot I empty that on the roots of the Camelia bush.
Bren

got talking to someone about the subject of teabags and the use of them and found out tea is an acid of ph 5.8 and could be used for blueberries and cranberries to keep the acidity down .
this reading was taken on a electronic ph meter and the theroy about growing these plants should work ( not tried it yet )but watering with tea looks like an option other than buying expencive erinacious compost and composted tea bags should give the soil water holding properties.

um - blueberries, pieris, heathers and the other ericaceous plants require an acid environment, therefore if tea bags reduce the acidity in the soil this would be counterproductive, would it not?

Carl
Did you mean keep the acidity up/PH down There's confusion already.
Alan

sorry not very clear,
if the tea/bags are used on normal soil it should reduce the ph instead of buying the proper expensive compost and then saving a few pounds.

sorry just re-read reply ,
ph 7 is classed as normal below that is acid down to ph 1 and above is alkaline up to ph 14 so adding tea /bags to the soil will reduce both ph and acidity over a long time.