Should You Use Banana Peels As A Natural Fertilizer For Tomato Plants?

Texas troubadour Guy Clark once famously sang that there are only two things that money can't buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes. For whatever reason, tomatoes are backyard garden royalty. Whether you've got the ones growing on tall vines or short and bushy tomatoes, it makes no difference. Few vegetable garden topics will generate more passion than advice on how to grow tomatoes. 

One of those topics is on the use of natural fertilizers. Will banana peels grow bigger, better-tasting tomatoes? Will the nutrients in the peels increase yield? Those are great questions. While we may not be able to verify Mr. Clark's conclusion, we can shed some light on whether you should use banana peels to help grow your tomato plants.

Banana peels contain some very important nutrients that tomatoes require such as calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. These nutrients are important for cell development, root growth, promoting blooms, and fighting disease. Adding banana peels to your compost is a great way to give your tomato plants a healthy leg up as they grow. But just as man does not live by bread (or tomatoes) alone, your plants will need more nutrients than just those three — so it's not a complete fertilizer, just a booster. A soil rich in microbes and diverse organic matter is required to grow healthy tomatoes.

The anecdotal evidence from fellow gardeners is that banana peels are great for tomatoes. So, they are certainly not bad for tomato plants, but how beneficial are they? The good news is that there have been at least a couple of studies that scientifically evaluate the effects of banana compost. A 2021 study from the Arab Universities Journal of Agricultural Sciences concluded that there was no difference between tomato fruits grown with powdered banana and orange peels and those grown with a commercially made organic fertilizer. In fact, a nutritionally balanced organic fertilizer (including those that have banana peels) has many benefits for tomato plants.

While throwing a banana peel next to your tomato plants may not be the magic solution to growing the perfect fruit, they can be a significant component in producing healthy plants. Tomatoes need nutrients such as calcium, potassium, and phosphorus, and a balanced compost that includes banana peels will provide those nutrients. By composting them, you will help grow healthy soil microbes and provide organic matter. If you're just using banana peels alone, however, you will not automatically produce the uber-tomato harvest we all dream of.

So, here's how to use a banana peel as plant food. There are a few ways to get banana peels in your garden effectively. If you don't want to wait for them to compost, one of the best ways is to mulch them and mix them with other organic products from your kitchen or your yard, then applying the results to your garden. You'll not only get the benefits from the banana peels, but from the other components of the mulch as well. If you are an organic gardener, use organically grown bananas to source your peels. Otherwise, you may introduce chemicals from the bananas grown with pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Some gardeners use a banana peel tea made from soaking the peels in water, then putting the tea around their tomato plants. Others have tried drying the peels and grinding them up or burying the peels near their tomato plants. Using the banana peels that way has a potential downside of attracting pests, unfortunately. 

Tomatoes are sometimes called "love apples," and there is no question that our love of homegrown tomatoes will continue to drive us to find better ways to grow them. Banana peels are one way to aid in their growth, but they are not a singular solution to our quest.