coffee compost

[olhillbilly]

After you brew your coffee, save your grounds. If you don't drink coffee, just stop by a local coffee shop, and they'll probably let you take home their grounds. Put the grounds in a canister like an ice cream bucket, a coffee can or a canister made specifically for coffee grounds. Then take the grounds out to your plants and scratch them into the soil.

Coffee grounds are an excellent fertile source of organic matter for plant food. They contain about four percent nitrogen, one percent phosphorus and three percent potassium.

Be aware, though, that fresh coffee grounds can burn very tiny transplants, so hold off on the strong stuff when the plants are young. Besides vegetables, acid-loving plants like azaleas, blueberries and conifers can also benefit from a cup of java.

Keep in mind, coffee grounds are acidic, so be careful how you apply them to the soil. In fact, it's probably a good idea to have your soil tested just so you don't overdo it.


Reprinted from HGTV

[Buni]

wonder if tea grounds would work too?

[WVsnowflake]

I don't know but I knew an old lady who brewed herself a cup of tea once a week and let it cool and fed it to her boston fern. The thing was huge ! she said if she misses a week it gets all wilty..... all you can do is try.

[Buni]

I'm going to try them...we drink a ton of tea around here so I will let you all know how it works:D

You know...I planted morning glories in front of my porch once..and when they were growing my mom would go outside and smoke...well, she would flick her ashes on them and I would freak...but the thing is...those morning glories grew like crazy!lol

[softbreeze]

My mom saved coffee grounds and used them faithfully. I wish I had kept notes of all the things she used to do that I thought at the time was silly and useless. Now that I am an old woman (LOL) I find that everything she did was truly usefull and she was much more than a mom.. She was a SMART mom! (unheard of when you are 16 of course) She also would save all of her eggshells, crack them up into small peices, put them in a pan and toast them in the oven. There was a smell, not really unpleasant..but different. After toasting she would grind them up or mash them real fine with a glass, and put this on her plants. My mom had the most gorgeous plants I have ever seen. Does anyone know anything about the eggshells thing and why it worked?

[WVsnowflake]

Does anyone know anything about the eggshells thing and why it worked?

I believe the egg shells are calcium. My mum used to do the same. And my dad would roast the shells and smash them up and feed them back to the chickens. Something about making their shells harder on the eggs. you just mixed it in with the oyster shell and layin mash.

[cenaub4]

Oh, my. People after my very own heart.

Remember, I live in the city...

StarBucks has a 'Grounds for Gardeners' program. Any coffee they brew, they bag the grounds, the filters, some water, and place them out on the floor in a bucket for customers to help themselves to.

Since we bought city property in Jan of '03 I now have LAND to do what ever I freakin WANT to do. So I started a compost heap. There is a lot of 'kitchen chemistry' to maintaining a healthy heap. I'm learning.

One of the biggest benefits of coffee grounds is that worms seem to really like it. Once you spread it out, or concentrate it in one place you increase your worm population. Always a good thing for girls...

Out here in California, one of our VERY WORST plant predators is slugs and snails. There has been conclusive proof that brewed coffee, the liquid, will mow through S & S like hot knives through butter. Something about the acidity just Does Them In. (YEAH!) It figures out to be about 3% of actual caffine that damages the soft tissues of S & S, somewhat in the neighborhood of a regular strength brewed cup of coffee. If you have left over in the pot, water your plants. I have terrible times with slugs moving into the bottom drain holes of plants and eating up the roots.

Just drying and sprinkling the grounds helps too.

I have a section about 15 feet by 3 feet against my back wall. My neighbors really hate it, but haven't found a strong (smelly enough) reason to knock on my front door. I have this tree that attracts what I 'used' to call June Bugs, but now, being in California, call Emerald Jewel Beetles. They turn that wonderful metalflake green with gold trim around their wings and exterior shells... They also come from grubs. I have a tree that blooms, fruits, and draws them by the hundreds. So the beetles lay larva into my compost piles and I shriek and shrill when I turn over a handful of grubs. #1 reason for owning chickens, I say!

We're so dry here, if I don't water my heap regular, it just sits there doing nothing. I started turning the older length of my pile, and watering in, doing hand sifting, pulling out the usuable compost from the not-broken-down stuff, when I realized that the bottom 3 inches was all grub poop! What a bonus! What a gold mine! So, I quit feeding grubs to the chickens, all but the oldest, fattest, finger sized grubs (who are chicken feed, rightyly so) go back into my pile.

Along with all the SB grounds I bring home, I keep the cats out of flower beds and places I DON'T want them. My three cats also dislike the smell of coffee grounds, and will 'go' somewhere else, rather than crappin in my heap! I HATE sifting away, and that SMELL just takes over, meaning you have it ALL over YOUR hands!

Damn creatures. Did I mention that I am composting chicken waste? I can't wait to hand sift that! NOT.

Oh, yeah. Egg shells.

Well, it takes a LONG time for egg shells to break down into useable calcium for uptake into plant roots. What it really does is add TILTH (help me now, its a big, brainiac word, and I don't need to hear that, I WILL explain) meaning drainage, and 'meat' to soil. When you have just dirt, dust, and sand in your soil, you have little tilth. When you measure tilth, you do soil absorbtion tests, run water through, timing it, seeing how long a hole dug into the ground x size takes to drain...... Tilth really is the amount of organic matter that ends up in your soil processes, whether dealing with gardens or planting beds, it speaks of the 'quality' of your soil.

I grow cactus. I went to my moms egg farm, and ate a LOT of eggs. She has Aracunas, which lay colored eggs. I wanted to remember the time I spent on her farm eating eggs, and figured I could use the shells to add drainage and body (tilth) to my own, home mixed soil, by nuking eggs and adding them into my custom soil mix. I have used shells ever since, and not because I think they are adding calcium (they could be, but only if the plant was in there with them over 10 years) but because they are adding drainage, and they remind me of Moms farm.

I am done going on. Sheesh, what a long winded woman. Some things NEVER CHANGE!

[GRANDMA COW]

Interesting I knew a little of this and just got educated on the rest