Ways Beer Can Help Your Garden Grow
Ladies and gentlemen, spring is almost here. That means ice cream vans will be playing their music, everyone you walk past will smell kind of like sun cream and you’re going to need a few good beers at the ready. Not just to please your mouth or improve your mood, but to get the most out of your garden.
That’s right, all those half-drunk beers you find laying around the day after a BBQ party can still have a really handy use: to help your lawn grow — and, best of all, it’s purely organic.
That’s because the yeast in beer has some pretty epic superpowers (as if you didn’t already know that). Of course, this makes homebrewed beer the ultimate champ given you always end up with a thin layer of yeast sitting at the bottom of each bottle, but it can work with all those well-known beers you love too.
Here’s how it works: the acid in beer is strong enough to kill almost all garden pests, while the sugar and yeast in your most trusted tipple is rich in beneficial bacteria (think: yeast, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus). Long story short: these nutrients work well as soil microbes to help your lawn thrive.
Don’t believe us? Here are 7 ways to help your garden grow using beer:
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Add Beer To Your Compost
You may know this already, but there are some pretty weird things you can compost, from chopsticks to vacuum dust to that gross aquarium gunk that builds up. It’s crazy. But two of our favourite things to put in your compost are beer and wine. That’s because the yeast and nitrogen found in the ammonia make a great starter to help speed up the composting process.
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Beer As A Spot Fertiliser
When the world goes back to normal and you’re able to show off that pizza oven you bought in Lockdown 2.0, hopefully you’ll be left with some half empty bottles so that you can fill a plastic jug with the dregs. Once you have enough, pour this beer mix into a sprayer bottle and spray your homemade solution on any brown or bare patches found on your lawn. The beer will act as a fertiliser and help any affected grass areas grow back healthier and stronger.
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Beer As A Whole Lawn Fertiliser
If it’s not just patches of your lawn that are a bit weak and thin and brown, but your whole lawn, you can still use beer as an epic fertiliser. That said, beer can attract slugs and snails (which isn’t ideal), so we recommend you dilute your beer with water before you start adding it to your lawn. To do this, you can use that old garden sprayer in the back of your shed, fling it around using a bucket or just pour it out and spread it around using the attachment on your hosepipe. Either way, using beer as a fertiliser will help build up your garden soil.
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Beer To Get Rid of Slugs and Snails
We think snails and slugs (but mainly snails) are as cute and lovely as the next person, but we have also seen how effectively they can destroy your garden, starting with your leafy plants. From those green veggies you’re growing to that herb patch you’ve started, slugs and snails can chomp their way through it all, leaving your garden vulnerable to disease. To stop this from happening, fill a shallow dish with beer and leave it next to your most beloved plants as a trap.
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Beer As A Fruit Fly Trap
If you grow berries or have a compost pile in your garden, you’ll know the struggle is real. Fruit flies relish those two things until they become a real nuisance. But there is an easy solution: using beer to make a fruit fly trap. Simply add the dregs of an old beer into a jar along with a few drops of dish detergent and then place this solution anywhere you have a big fruit fly problem. They’ll find the smell irresistible, fly towards it and get trapped.
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Beer Bottles As Watering Globes
We’ve all seen those expensive plant watering bulbs for sale on our Facebook feeds or in those addictive Buzzfeed emails we can’t unsubscribe from, but never committed to them because, well, they’re expensive. Thankfully, beer bottles can do the same thing. All you need to do is grab an empty bottle, turn it upside and push it into the soil of your favourite plants until it stands upright on its own. Now remove it, fill it with water and place it back in the flower bed / plant pot. In the same way those expensive plant watering bulbs work, when your plant’s soil dries out, your beer bottle will release water from the bottle to keep the soil moist. What a garden hack.
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Beer Brings in Butterflies
Beer doesn’t just make great pest traps, it can also attract some incredibly beautiful and very valuable pollinators, such as butterflies, which will then help your garden grow and more fruit to bloom. Here’s how to attract butterflies from miles around to your garden.
- Grab a mixing bowl and add five overripe bananas, one cup of brown cane sugar and 1½ cups of beer.
- Mash up the bananas and start mixing everything together until you’ve created a thick paste.
- Leave this mixture somewhere high so that it’s not on the ground to avoid attracting any unwanted bugs and pests
- Watch as butterflies come to dance in your garden and pollinate your plants.
That there is our top tips with 7 Ways Beer Can Help Your Garden Grow!
Quick Word of Warning
As you’ve seen, there are over a half-dozen ways using beer in your garden can have a positive impact on growth and pest control and pollination, but you do need to be mindful while doing so. A lot of what people recommend involves pest control by using beer to lure the insects to their death, which is because many insects can’t resist the scent of beer. As such, it’s important you’re mindful of what insects you may be attracting when using beer in your garden. It’s also important to use well diluted beer as this is a lot less likely to attract ants, slugs, snails and other unwanted insects. So don’t just pour any leftover beers you find in your garden and walk away, but rather dilute them with water first.
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