For years, the milk industry fed us lines such as “Milk, it does a body good” and the perhaps not entirely subliminal messaging in the “Drink Milk, Love Life” jingle.
As it turns out, milk does a garden a lot of good too.
Experts say that milk can benefit the plants in your garden, helping them to obtain optimal health.
We’ve outlined 7 of the top ways to use milk for this purpose below.
Milk can be a fertilizer.
The nourishing properties that humans and animals get from milk is also beneficial to plants. This includes calcium, which has been shown to be able to strengthen plans as well as humans. The sugar in milk has also been shown to help yield healthier crops. Using milk as a fertilizer might be just what your garden needs.
Using milk to disinfect.
Using milk to disinfect pruners instead of bleach can be just as beneficial to them. Milk will take on antiseptic properties when applied to areas that receive direct sunlight.
Preventing fungus.
Placing water-diluted milk onto the surface of plants is an excellent way to prevent fungus disease, mold, or rot. Experts recommended mixing 1 part milk for ever 2-3 parts water for this. You can then put the mixture into a spray bottle and use on your plants every 10 days or so. It’s best to start this early in the growing season.
Milk improves the health of soil.
Soil will absorb the vitamins and fat from milk. This means your soil gets healthier the more you put on it or your compost pile. Some gardeners will pour a diluted watered-down milk solution onto their soil but others enjoy just sprinkling powdered milk over the soil the areas they feel could use it.
Milk is great for tomatoes.
Milk can be excellent for tomatoes but you can’t be using it too willy nilly. Top gardeners recommend using a mixture of 1 part milk and 9 parts water and then spraying on your tomatoes once every few weeks until mid-summer. This should help protect your tomatoes from diseases.
Using milk to deter insects.
Milk can also be an excellent way to deter bugs from taking up residency in your garden. For it to work for this purpose, however, you must use whole milk. This is according to a study found in the Journal of Eco-Friendly Agriculture.
If you are looking to use milk to prevent bugs, it should also be milk from a cow. Applying whole milk from a cow to your garden has been shown to deter mites, thrips, aphids, and other annoying garden pests.
Mix in some molasses with your milk.
One way to increase the effectiveness of all the benefits mentioned above is to mix in a little molasses with your milk. This gives your garden an added boost of the same sugars to keep your plants strong and healthy. This combination has also been shown to prevent weeds by altering soil conditions to ones unfavorable to their growth.
You can learn more about using milk in your garden with the video below.
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