Do Tomato Plants Like Tea Bags? (Solved & Explained!)

Tea bags are a great way of adding acids and nutrients into the soil to improve your garden and lawn. But will your tomato plants benefit from burying tea bags?

Tomatoes love acidic soils with a pH between 5.5 and 7.0, and tea bags help add tannic acid to that soil. The acid in tea bags also helps break down organic matter, which helps with composting and can even attract more earthworms to improve your tomato plants.

Let’s discover some of the benefits tomatoes get from tea bags, from improving the soil’s nutrients and acid levels to keeping pests and animals away. 

What Benefits Do Tomatoes Get From Tea Bags?

We’ve already talked about some of the benefits of tea bags for tomatoes but let’s dig a little deeper and list a few more so you know what you’re missing out on by throwing away your tea bags when you finish with them.

1. Adds beneficial acids to the soil: tea leaves have tannic acid, which increases the soil’s pH levels. Tomatoes thrive in acidic soil, so mixing in some tea leaves can give them an excellent boost. 
2. Tea bags keep away pests: most common pests don’t like the smell of tea leaves, so burying a few tea bags next to your tomato plants will keep them far away. It even keeps away larger pests like cats and mice. 
3. Tea bags keep away weeds: tea bags not only keep away pests but weeds as well.
4. Tea prevents fungal diseases: you’ll need to spray the tea brew on your plants to get this benefit, but tea is a fantastic way to prevent and control fungus on your tomatoes. 
5. Tea bags add nutrients: there are all kinds of nutrients in tea bags that your tomatoes can benefit from, like nitrogen.
6. Tea bags speed up decomposition in compost: even if you decide not to bury your tea bags in your garden, you can get plenty of benefits from putting them in the compost. The tannic acid in the tea leaves helps break down the compost and add nutrients. 
7. It reduces waste: some tea bags aren’t compostable because they have plastic, so buying tea bags you know you’ll use in your garden means reducing waste.
8. Tea feeds earthworms: earthworms are an excellent addition to your garden and can help your tomatoes thrive. They love to munch tea leaves and are more likely to make your garden their home. 
9. Tea bags make excellent mulch: tomatoes don’t do well in dry conditions, so making mulch from your tea bags can help keep moisture in the soil and your tomato plants healthy. 

What are the Best Tea Bags for Tomatoes?

Now that you know all the benefits of tea bags for your tomato plants, you’re probably wondering what type of tea is the best. You might even be worrying about whether or not certainties are harmful to your tomato plants, whereas others will give you the benefits you’re looking for. 

The good news is that even though there are hundreds of different tea flavors, they all come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. The only difference in the tea types and flavors comes from harvesting at different times of the year and mixing other ingredients such as herbs or dried fruit.

Most teas are from the same plant, so you aren’t going to see any harmful side effects. However, you should check the bag’s material, as some tea bags have plastic and other synthetic materials that don’t decompose.

How to Use Tea Tags to Help Tomato Plants

So now that you know the many benefits of using tea bags for your tomato plants and you can pick a t without having to worry about it harming them, we can get into some tips on how exactly to use your tea bags.

How you decide to use your tea bags will greatly depend on what you want to use them for, whether mulch or fertilizer or as a fungal disease repellent. In most cases, you are better off removing the bag and using the tea leaves because you can have many more uses.

If you want to create mulch, you can put the tea bags around the base of your tomato plants or bury them in the soil.

If you want to make fertilizer, you are better off removing the tea leaves from the bags and mixing them with compost. 

To prevent fungal diseases, you must use the tea you brew from the tea bag instead of the tea bag itself. However, there are some cautions to using tea brew.

How to Correctly Use Brewed Tea

While using tea to spray on the leaves of your plants and even pouring it into the soil can have tons of nutrients and benefits for your Tomatoes, there are some cautions to take while using brewed tea.

The biggest caution that you should be aware of is the temperature. You should never use brewed tea immediately after making it because the high temperatures will damage your plants’ roots and leaves. You should leave the brewed tea out until it’s room temperature, and then you can use it.

Another thing you’re going to want to avoid is using any tea with other ingredients, such as sugar, milk, cream, or honey. It might be that you love adding those to a cup of tea you’re going to drink, but your tomato plants aren’t going to appreciate it and are likely to will or even die if you have those ingredients mixed in.

Conclusion

Tomato plants not only like tea bags, but they thrive with them. Tea leaves have tannic acid and other nutrients that increase the acidic levels of the soil and encourage worms to pay a visit while keeping away pests like insects and cats. 

You shouldn’t buy tea bags just to use their properties to benefit your plants. Not only is it a waste of money, but you could always buy fertilizers specifically to help your tomato plants grow better. However, if you’re an avid tea drinker, using those tea bags for other purposes is a great way to reduce waste.