Your garden loves coffee as much as you do
Did you know that recycling doesn’t just extend to glass and cardboard? You can also use your old coffee grounds as a valuable component part of your compost.
Some coffee houses are making their coffee grounds available so that they can be used in this way, bonding businesses to their community via the land itself.
Why are coffee grounds a good addition to compost? They contain nitrogen (estimated around 2%) which is about the same percentage as grass clippings. The grounds also maintain heat, which is useful to kill weed seeds and cut down on pathogens.
Once the coffee has been brewed, the acidity in the beans has largely been released, which means that the risks of the grounds making the compost acidic is reduced. Published results indicate that the ground’s pH value is approximately 6.5 to 6.8. While the coffee grounds are excellent organic matter, if the plants you are growing need a higher pH value, such as cantaloupes for example, it would be best to go easy on the coffee grounds you mix into the soil.
There are other uses to which green-fingered gardeners can put the coffee grounds. If spread thinly around plants and then topped with a coarser mulch, the coffee grounds can behave as a gentle, slow-release fertilizer. Evergreens are said to respond especially well to this treatment.
So the next time you use your coffee machine, spare a thought for your garden and try recycling the grounds, so that your plants will benefit from the coffee beans, as well as you.