Coffee Grounds as an Organic Fertilizer

Coffee grounds are a useful source of nutrients for your garden, if employed properly. The appropriate amount of grounds to use depends upon the condition of the soil and, more specifically, what you plan to grow in your garden.

Tips for Using Coffee Grounds

Check with your local gardening expert to see what's most beneficial for your p.

And have a soil test done to determine soil pH.

Add coffee grounds along with other materials as a side dressing or mulch for vegetables, roses, and other plants. They are rich in nitrogen, and thus are also acidic.

Adding brown material, such as leaves and dried out grass, to the mulch will help create or maintain a well-balanced soil pH.

Blend the grounds into your compost. They'll behave as a green material with a carbon-nitrogen ratio of 20 to 1.

That high nitrogen level (the fire), combined with brown materials (the fuel), will ensure that your compost gets good and hot, killing off most of the pathogens and weed seeds and accelerating the creation of an excellent soil amendment to use in your gardens.

You can also add coffee grounds to a worm bin. The worms will feed on the grounds as long as they're mixed with other materials. Before long, your red wigglers or other composting worms will be thriving and growing in numbers.

Roses and Hydrangeas

Coffee grounds are great to use around hybrid tea roses. And place the grounds under hydrangeas to make the blossoms a very bright blue color.

Sources of Coffee Grounds

If your needs are small, use your own grounds. If you use an unbleached paper filter, throw that in along with your grounds.

If you have a lot of garden beds, you'll need to supplement your own coffee pot. Coffee shops in your area will probably be more than delighted to give them to you.

It saves them having to pay to have them hauled to the landfill, which is, of course, a sad waste of very useful organic matter.

Starbucks has made it their policy to give coffee grounds to anyone who asks for them. You could end up with 50 to 100 lb of grounds if you have a busy location nearby.

Take your own plastic tubs when you go to collect your share.

Not Just the Grounds

It's not just coffee grounds that are great for your plants. Try watering them with the balance of your daily coffee pot after you've had your fill. Dilute it by about half and simply pour some in each plant pot or next to each plant in the garden. You'll be amazed at the results.

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