Coffee grounds are great in the garden.
Every day in the USA, millions of pots of coffee and tea are brewed, and the millions of pounds of wet grounds, filters and bags thrown in the trash. This practice is both wasteful and foolish.
In our county, wet coffee grounds are trucked miles away to be burned in an incinerator. Every try to burn wet coffee grounds? Crazy. More importantly, coffee grounds are really useful things. Why truck them away and burn them?
In an effort to make the world a better place, I started a Coffee Ground Rescue Project at the Pleaseantville Black Cow. This project helps to decrease the amount of coffee grounds being sent to the incinerator in Peekskill and helps to build soil fertility in Westchester County.
Coffee grounds are great for your garden:
You can sprinkle used grounds around plants before rain or watering, for slow-release nitrogen.
Coffee grounds are a great addition for compost piles to increase nitrogen balance. Coffee filters and tea bags break down rapidly during composting.
Make a gentle, fast-acting liquid fertilizer. Use about a half-pound can of wet grounds in a five-gallon bucket of water; let sit outdoors for a while to bring it to the right temperature.
Mix into soil for houseplants or new vegetable beds. Slugs and ants are repelled by coffee grounds, encircle the base of the plant with a coffee and eggshell barrier to repel pests.
If you are a worm composter like me, feed a little bit to your worms
Composting: Coffee grounds are 1.45% nitrogen and contain calcium and magnesium to add some trace minerals you may not get from your other organic material. Coffee grounds are a “green” material (I realize coffee is brown in color, but when it comes to composting they are high in nitrogen like food scraps and grass clippings) so you should add with at least equal amounts of brown material (carbon sources such as leaves, paper) but if you are like me my browns are way too high already.
Black Cow Coffee Roasters, Pleasantville
The staff at Pleasantville’s Black Cow are very supportive of rescuing coffee grounds. They save their grounds for rescuing daily since the day they opened last summer. They’ve been packing them into 5 gallon plastic buckets that I supplied them with.
If you live in Northern Westchester county and want to be part of this innovative Coffee Rescue Project, please contact me via email: drsusanrubin@gmail.com
If you live somewhere else and are interested in starting your own coffee rescue project, contact me, I’ll help you brainstorm ways to set it up!
Susan Rubin, Master Composter/Recycler.
