Coffee grounds left over from freshly brewed coffee have many uses in the garden. Here are some exciting ways to give old coffee grounds a fresh life while benefiting the health, beauty and vitality of your garden:
- Adding the coffee grounds to the compost pile with other kitchen and garden waste is the simplest way to use them. Despite its brown colour, coffee grounds constitute green waste similar to grass cuttings and weeds from your garden. Even after the coffee liquid is filtered away, the grounds still contain many proteins, fatty acids and carbohydrates which will provide nutrients to the microorganisms that turn your organic waste into compost.
- if coffee is incorporated into the soil, they greatly improve both the texture as well as the organic content. Being slightly acidic, coffee grounds lower the pH of the soil. They are very slow to break down, releasing nitrogen and other nutrients to the plants over an extended period of time, while keeping the soil loose and aerated. . All you have to do is spread an inch of coffee grounds in a part of the garden and work it into the soil with a rake. After you have covered a large area over several days or weeks, it’s a good idea to till it deep into the soil with a rototiller.
- You can directly add the dry grounds to your vermicomposting bin after dampening it slightly, or just dump your disposable coffee filters in along with the residue. The worms eat shredded paper, so they consider the paper filters a treat. Some people find that soaking the papers and cardboard with weak coffee make them more delectable to the worms. You can extract this tea-colored liquid from the grounds by adding warm water to them.
- Long before soil pH and other finer aspects of gardening became known, coffee grounds were used to fertilize roses. Now we know that coffee grounds make the soil acidic, and that roses love acidic soil.
- Coffee grounds can be used as a general fertilizer. Coffee grounds release a good amount of nitrogen as they decompose. This is one of the three macro nutrients every plant needs for healthy growth, the other two being potassium and phosphorous.