Know More About Tea Leaves
If you happen to be drinking tea every day and you have your own garden at home, then you can definitely promote sustainability by composing used leaves of the tea while not being able to compose other materials. Tea leaves are rich in nutrients and loose tea makes an outstanding mulch which can be applied directly to the soil in your garden. The first thing that you should do is to collect these tea and put them in a container, after that, you can already apply it directly to your garden, you can do this routine every day or you can also do it every other day.
While loose-leaf tea can be applied directly to your garden, teabags require slightly more effort. Most of the time, teabags happen to not biodegradable. However, it has been known that for the past years, the use of nylon teabags has been very prevalent. The good thing about nylon is that, it is the type of material which will not break down if you apply it to the compost. While there are other nylon teabags, there are also teabags which are made up of paper, that is why you cannot apply this type of teabags to a compost because it contains non-biodegradable materials such as staple wire.
Even with fully biodegradable teabags, one must exercise caution. Many tea companies claim that their teabags are biodegradable and compostable, but say nothing about the amount of time required for decomposition. However, there are also some of the high quality teabags that can be used since they are made up of silk, however, these type of teabags decomposes slowly. Compared to other waste that can be seen in the kitchen, paper happens to decomposes slowly. Whereas the leaves inside a teabag are suitable for direct application to a garden, depending on conditions, the bag itself may take a year or more to fully decompose–much longer than most fruit and vegetable compost.
One of the ways in applying the inside of the teabags is by opening it, whether it is a biodegradable teabag or not. However, the best way of using the teabags is to buy the ones which are biodegradable and avoid those teabags which are packed in nylon bags since you still need to remove the package before you can apply the insides to the garden. But if you happen to buy a tea already packed in biodegradable bag, but you think that it decomposes very slowly, then it is time for you to remove the leaves and directly apply it to your garden. You can easily remove the leaves from the bag if you let the teabag sit overnight until it dries.