Cactus garden thrives with fertiliser made from dregs of beer, bourbon, coke, boiled egg water

Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With dregs from eggs and tins of beer, bourbon and cans of coke. 

Mother Goose might not approve of this jazzed-up version of the classic nursery rhyme, but cactus collector Patricia Harman certainly would.

Ms Harman has hundreds of cacti in her garden collected over 15 years, which she affectionately refers to as 'Misspat's Blooming Balls from Boulder'.

The garden's namesake comes from the ball-like shape of many of the cacti, how frequently they flower, and the fact she lives in Boulder in WA's Goldfields region.

Cactus flowers are elusive and short-lived, and Ms Harman attributes her success to a smelly brown concoction she makes at home.

"We feed them dregs," she said.

"We keep cans for recycling, anything leftover in the cans goes into the bucket.

"Could be anything, coke, beer.

"Bourbon, the water from a boiled egg, extra coffee, everything goes into that and then [I] water it down."

Ms Harman worked as a bartender in the mining town during her younger years, so she knows booze.

But she didn't know it would help her plants. She just decided to try it when the idea came to her.

"I just was tipping it out one day and thought: 'That might do for the plants'," she said.

Ms Harman said she also waters the cacti regularly with fresh water as well as greywater from her home.

Luckily, Ms Harman is an early riser because the window for cactus flowers to bloom is small and they start opening in the early hours of the morning.

"I just think it's amazing that we're in the desert and to wake up and see your whole garden's full of flowers and they're beautiful flowers," she said.

"They only last one day, some even two hours and then they just drop off."

Ms Harman says "it's pretty sad", but she takes lots of photos and put them on her Facebook page — Misspat Harman.

Misspat's Blooming Balls from Boulder are well known by locals on social media and have become a running joke between Ms Harman and friends she's made online. 

"There was a guy, he kept complaining about seeing my balls on Facebook," she said.

"He said 'Stop putting your balls on Facebook', so I made him a fridge magnet with a photo of it — so now he can see them all the time."

Horticulturist and ABC gardening expert Sabrina Hahn had a theory about why the unusual fertiliser works.

"Alcohol contains sugar, yeast, and hops," she said.

"Sugar and yeast act as a type of fertiliser, but the other thing the yeast does is feed the microbes that are in the potting mix."

Ms Hahn said the boiled egg water was giving the plants calcium and potassium.

"Potassium, of course, encourages flowering," she said.

"So all those different drinks that she's giving the cactus are like a slow-release, biological fertiliser."

Ms Hahn thinks Ms Harman is a "genius".

"She's got it sussed," she said.

"In fact, I'm so impressed with the flowers on her cactus I'm going to start feeding a couple of my orchids beer and see what happens."

Ms Hahn had one more, less likely, theory about why the cacti were blooming.

"Maybe they just get drunk and think 'Oh, what the hell, let's just flower'," she said.

"They're de-stressed."

Cacti flower in the dark to attract night-flying insects that act as pollinators, and the flowers only last a day to conserve water so the plants can survive in arid conditions.

Ms Hahn said flower initiation could be caused by a few different factors, including air temperature, ground temperature, rainfall, and the age of the cactus.

"If you have a perfect combination of water, air temperature, and humidity you will get mass flowering," she said.

"There'll be seasons say once every five or 15 years, you'll get extraordinary flowering that you won't get in other years, that's just the natural cycle they have."

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