subject: Can You Really Use Coffee Grounds In Your Garden? [print this page] Any experienced gardener can tell you that coffee grounds are a useful addition to promote a healthy garden. Coffee grounds contain such substances as nitrogen, tannic acids, antioxidants, and other nutrients, which will directly benefit plants that thrive in acidic soil to create a beautiful and lush garden.
If you are a gardener that needs a large amount of used coffee grounds, you can visit your local Starbucks, where you will normally be able to get used grounds that are being thrown out for free. Coffee grounds have a very high content of nitrogen, so they will create a quality mulch for vegetables. Mulch created from coffee grounds will reduce snail and slug activity to keep plants, such as lilies and hostas, protected. Mulch made from coffee grounds will also help to promote healthy growth in spring bulbs, like daffodils.
As you start to use coffee grounds in your garden, sprinkle used and cooled grounds around your plants before watering or rainfall. This will create an environment of slow release nitrogen. It is useful to dry out the coffee grounds and manually mix them in with your soil around acid loving plants. Some examples of plants that thrive in acidity are azaleas, gardenias, cranberries, mountain laurels, blueberries, heathers, pecans, oaks, spruces, azaleas, and ferns. It is also helpful to add used grounds to piles of compost to increase the nitrogen balance. In fact, you can throw in the paper coffee filter with the coffee grounds since it will break down quickly during compost.
If you want to create a quick and eco-friendly fertilizer for your garden, dilute these same used grounds with water to create a gentle and effective fertilizer for your plants. You can mix used grounds into your vegetable garden and houseplant soil to help them grow even faster. If you want to protect your plants from the pests in the garden, you can sprinkle eggshells and coffee grounds around their base to keep away any unwanted plant predators. This will also work well to naturally and safely keep cats from digging in your garden and using it as a litter box!
Coffee grounds make a high quality mulch because they have a low acidity of a pH between 3.0 and 5.0. They will provide benefits to all of the plants previously mentioned, and they are also an eco-friendly alternative to feed and fertilize plants in your garden. This is the main reason that so many coffee lovers have taken the opportunity to recycle their used grounds so that they are not tossed in the trash to create further waste in landfills.
It is best to use coffee grounds as needed because if you dump too many in your garden at once, they have the potential to go bad and create a layer of fungus when they are exposed to air. When you use them in moderation, coffee grounds will offer an eco-friendly alternative to cultivate your home garden!
