How can I reuse or recycle banana skins?
We’ve covered very, very brown bananas before but I was reading a Mrs Beeton-style book on home management from the 1930s the other day (as you do), and I saw a reference to using banana skins to clean brown leather shoes.
According to the hefty tome (which also includes chapters on engaging servants, etiquette for women and fortune-telling – all essential to the 1930s homemaker), rubbing the inside of a banana skin on brown leather shoes helps feed the leather. A bit of Googling seems to corroborate this and adds that the same idea can also be applied to silverware.
Any other cunning ways to reuse banana peel?
(We’ve covered orange peel before – that’s got loads of reuses…)
Cool! Do you think it would work on leather sofas too? Ours is looking a bit old and tatty (it’s cream leather) so I wonder if it would work? Might try it out as my two eat lots of bananas.
Boring but nutritious: chop them up and dig them down around your roses.
My grandmother, and mother use them to dust spider plants. made the hall smell bananaey
rubbing them on mosquito bites or burns is supposed to help heal your skin… i don’t know if it is as good as aloe, but worth a try.
banana peels can be used as an all-natural temporary lubricant. you can also compost them.
Just as a ripe banana in the fruit bowl helps to mature the other fruit in it, banana skins are said to help mature tomatoes in the plants… You just hang them into the plant, next to your green tomatoes. Be prepared for comments from your friends. ;)
And if you have goats – mine loved banana skins! I would only feed them organic ones, though, as bananas get sprayed incredibly often during their lifetime, and dipped in a chemical solution before transport to prevent them from rotting.
Hey, you can also throw them around and have people slip on them! 8]
they would polish wooden furniture also.
I cut the ends off before peeling, dry them, and use them in art. I take the “straight” part of the peel, scrape off the soft stuff and shred the skin. When dried, it looks like spiders, because the shreds curl. Oh, yeah, I put them on top of bottles to dry, so the “legs” hang downward.
Next I’m spraypainting the dried “flowers” and layering them for Christmas “Chrysanthenums”. Gold and pink this session.