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What plants are used coffee grounds good for


How to Use Coffee Grounds in Your Garden

If you make a daily pot of coffee, you have a fabulous source of organic matter right at your fingertips. Coffee grounds can make your garden happier in several ways, and not just that coffee gives you more energy for weeding and pruning. Don't toss the grounds! You can put them to work.

Put coffee grounds in your compost bin. There are two types of compost material: brown and green. Your coffee grounds may be brown in color, but in compost jargon they are green material, meaning an item that is rich in nitrogen. Coffee grounds are approximately 1.45 percent nitrogen. They also contain magnesium, calcium, potassium, and other trace minerals. Other green compost materials include food scraps and grass clippings.

Adding coffee grounds and used paper coffee filters to your compost will provide green compost material. However, it must be balanced with brown compost material, which includes dry leaves and newspapers. There should be a 4-to-1 ratio of brown compost material to green compost material. If you have too much green material your compost pile will start to smell. If you don't have enough, the compost pile won't heat up.

The Spruce / Sarah Crowley

Fertilize With Coffee Grounds

Add coffee grounds directly to the soil in your garden. You can scratch it into the top couple inches of soil, or just sprinkle the grounds on top and leave it alone. In smaller amounts, especially when mixed with dry materials, coffee grounds will give up their nitrogen. Used coffee grounds are actually nearly neutral in pH, so they shouldn't cause concerns about their acidity. Be careful not to use too many coffee grounds or pile them up. The small particles can lock together, creating a water resistant barrier in your garden.

You can also make coffee ground "tea." Add 2 cups of used coffee grounds to a 5-gallon bucket of water. Let the "tea" steep for a few hours or overnight. You can use this concoction as a liquid fertilizer for garden and container plants. It also makes a great foliar feed you can spray directly on the leaves and stems of your plants.

The Spruce / Sarah Crowley 

Feed Your Worms

Add coffee grounds to your worm bin every week or so. Worms love coffee grounds! Just don't add too many at once, because the acidity could bother your worms. A cup or so of grounds per week for a small worm bin is perfect. In addition to using coffee grounds in your worm bin, earthworms in your soil will also be more attracted to your garden when you use them mixed with the soil as fertilizer.

Keep the Pests Away

Create a slug and snail barrier. Coffee grounds are abrasive, so a barrier of grounds placed near slug-prone plants may just save them from these garden pests. However, be warned that some researchers quibble with this advice and don't think it is effective. You may want to have a backup plan in mind if it doesn't work. Many cats dislike the smell of coffee grounds and may avoid using your garden as a litter box if you mix coffee grounds into the soil.

The Spruce / Sarah Crowley 

Fresh Coffee Grounds for Acid-Loving Plants

While used coffee grounds are only slightly acidic, fresh (unbrewed) coffee grounds have more acid. Your acid-loving plants like hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas, lily of the valley, blueberries, carrots, and radishes can get a boost from fresh grounds. However, tomatoes do not like fresh coffee grounds; keep them out of that area of the garden. This could be a good use for coffee that is getting old in your pantry or a type you bought for visiting friends but isn't your usual cup of joe.

Fresh coffee grounds still have most of their caffeine content as well as the acid. Don't use coffee grounds on seedlings or very young plants, as caffeine can stunt their growth. Be cautious in using fresh grounds around pets or your wire terrier may become extremely wired.

The Spruce / Sarah Crowley

Dissenting Research Into Coffee Grounds in the Garden

One 2016 research study found that using spent coffee grounds in growing broccoli, leek, radish, viola, and sunflower resulted in poorer growth in all soil types, with or without additional fertilizer. The good news is that the coffee grounds improved the water holding capacity of the soil and decreased weed growth. The researchers think the poorer growth was due to the plant-toxic compounds naturally present in the coffee grounds. If you aren't getting the results you hoped for with coffee grounds, you may want to try your own experiments with and without them in your garden.

What Plants Like Coffee Grounds?

Coffee grounds are a popular compost material and they can do wonders for your garden — if you use them well. Not all plants will thrive on a coffee diet, so it’s important to avoid throwing those beans around.

What plants like coffee grounds, and which parts of your garden should you avoid? We’ll show you how to use coffee in your garden — the right way. Using coffee grounds for plants can be a great gardening trick, but only if you do it the right way.

First of all… what’s in a coffee ground?

We don’t mean this metaphorically. What are coffee grounds made of, chemically speaking? Coffee grounds are full of nitrogen, a crucial plant nutrient. They also contain caffeine. Surprisingly, coffee grounds are neutral on the pH scale, instead of acidic as you might expect. This is because the acid is water-soluble and ends up in your cup rather than the grounds.

And what about caffeine? Though humans enjoy the effects of a caffeinated cup of joe, plants like coffee and chocolate developed caffeine to cut down on the competition. Caffeine prevents other plants from growing — allowing the caffeinated plant to make use of all of the available water and nutrients in the soil. What does that mean for your garden? Adding caffeinated coffee grounds may impede the growth of your plants.

What are the benefits of gardening with coffee grounds?

Coffee grounds provide nitrogen, a classic ingredient in most fertilizers. Plants need nitrogen to grow. Coffee grounds are also popular with worms, so if you’re vermicomposting or trying to encourage worms, they can be a great addition. And according to one study, coffee grounds can help your soil retain water, meaning you won’t have to water as often, and can diminish weed growth. Keep in mind that the same study also showed decreased plant growth overall.

Keeping Away Pests

Coffee grounds may also protect your plants from pests like slugs and snails. The grounds are abrasive, meaning these pests won’t like crawling over them to get to your tasty plants.

Some gardeners swear by coffee grounds as a cat repellent. If you often have cats digging around in your plants or using your garden as a litter box, you may want to consider adding coffee grounds to the soil.

Keep in mind that coffee’s ability to protect your garden from pests hasn’t been fully studied, so it may not work for you.

What plants like coffee grounds?

The plants that like coffee grounds include roses, blueberries, azaleas, carrots, radishes, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, cabbage, lilies, and hollies.

You’ll want to avoid using coffee grounds on plants like tomatoes, clovers, and alfalfa. When in doubt, it’s probably safer to put your used coffee grounds in the compost bin — or check out our list of other uses for them!

Coffee Grounds in Your Garden: The Bottom Line

Using coffee grounds in your garden has its share of pros and cons, and we hope this article has answered your questions. Coffee can impede plant growth, but it may also keep away certain pests. Plants like carrots, roses, cabbage, and hydrangeas like coffee grounds — but avoid using them on tomatoes and clovers. If you’re not sure, the compost bin is always a good place for spent coffee grounds! The bottom line? Coffee grounds for plants can supercharge your garden — but this trick will only work on certain plants.

More great reads:

Table of Contents

90,000 for which plants are suitable, how to use cake and ground coffee in the garden and garden

Content:

    1. For which plants are
    2. Methods of use
      • Watering
      • Mulching
      • Supplement
      • compost
      • for soil seedlings
      • Pest protection
    3. Where not to use
    4. Helpful tips

thick as a fertilizer for indoor plants, flowers and gardens.

The answer to the question of whether coffee grounds can be used as fertilizer is obvious: of course you can! But let's take a closer look at what benefits this brings to plants.

  1. By adding coffee grounds to the soil, especially clay and loam soil, its structure becomes looser, drainage capacity and air exchange improve. In addition, coffee attracts earthworms, which also contribute to loosening the soil.
  2. The smell of coffee can repel harmful insects. He doesn't like cats either. If you sprinkle your garden beds with coffee grounds, you don't have to worry that uninvited visits from your pet will damage tender plantings.
  3. It is believed that fresh coffee has an increased level of acidity, and top dressing with such characteristics is not suitable for every plant. However, to avoid acidification of the soil, it is enough to shed thick water and then apply in the garden or vegetable garden.
  4. Coffee grounds as a fertilizer are rich in minerals and trace elements. Potassium and phosphorus contribute to good flowering and abundant fruiting. Nitrogen activates the rapid growth of plants. Copper helps to resist a number of diseases. And although the total amount of useful substances in coffee cake is about 2–3%, which means that it can hardly be considered a full-fledged fertilizer, the use of grounds as an organic plant food is fully justified.

What kind of plants is coffee fertilizer suitable for? Therefore, before you widely use it in your garden, you need to study for which plants it is most effective to use coffee grounds as a fertilizer. It is most useful for flowers that prefer a low pH level - azaleas, hydrangeas, heathers and rhododendrons. Due to the large amount of potassium in the composition, coffee grounds can be used as a fertilizer when growing vegetable crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Feeding fruit trees with sleeping coffee will also help to significantly increase their fruiting. Magnesium, which is part of coffee, is useful for berry bushes.

Magnesium and potassium will help to get a high yield of root crops, while nitrogen is indispensable for green crops.

Roses, palms, ficuses and ferns, as well as violets and asparagus, respond best to coffee fertilization. When using coffee grounds as a fertilizer for houseplants, it is recommended to shed and dry it first. If you simply pour the rest of the coffee from the cup into the pot, most likely there will be no benefit, but on the contrary, the soil may become covered with a crust and begin to mold. To prevent this, you need to mix the prepared thick with soil suitable for this type of plant.

Coffee with sugar or milk should not be used for horticultural, horticultural and flower crops, as sugar attracts ants, and milk provokes the development of putrefactive processes in the soil, which can harm the root system of plants.

Methods of use

Watering

Used coffee must be diluted with a sufficient amount of liquid before it can be used as a fertilizer for watering plants. To prepare a solution for 10 liters of water, 1 cup of grounds is required. Cake is poured with a small amount of water and left to swell for about a day. After swelling, the amount of liquid is adjusted to the calculated amount and used for watering plants.

After feeding the plants with coffee grounds, it is advisable to water the soil again, but with clean water. This technique will allow the minerals to be slowly released, nourishing the plants. When planting bushes, you should spill the ground with coffee solution at the rate of 1 liter under the bush.

Mulching

Coffee grounds can also be used for mulching crops to protect soil from drying out, repel pests and improve soil structure. However, it must be remembered that when using the grounds as mulch, as in the case of using coffee cake as a fertilizer in the garden in the country, it should be thoroughly dried to prevent the development of mold.

Soil supplement

Dormant ground coffee as a fertilizer can be added to the planting hole or hole before planting to improve soil structure. This technique makes the land more drained and loose, which ultimately has a positive effect on plant health and yield. When used on light soils, the thick acts as a binder. In this case, top dressing is applied to the upper soil layer at the rate of 200 ml per 1 m².

Compost

To speed up the maturation of the compost, it is enough to spill each layer no more than 10 cm thick with coffee infusion. Coffee grounds perform the function of nitrogen components that trigger an exothermic reaction inside the compost heap, in other words, heating it up, due to which the compost matures much faster. This method is so effective that some summer residents specifically purchase inexpensive varieties of ground coffee and sprinkle layers of compost on them.

For seedlings

Recently, the method of growing vegetable seedlings on a coffee substrate has become popular. But in order to prevent depletion of the soil, it is necessary from time to time to feed the seedlings with complex fertilizers.

Protection against pests

Coffee pomace as a fertilizer in the garden is also very effective for protecting plants from sexually mature individuals of harmful insects - ants, snails, aphids, slugs. According to the experience of some gardeners, coffee can also destroy pest larvae, in particular mosquitoes and garden bugs. This remedy is not as effective as insecticides, but also much safer.

Where not to use coffee grounds

Coffee grounds are rich in nitrogen, so if used in excess, you can burn the root system, which will lead to the death of the plant.

Poorly dried coffee waste can cause mold and fungal diseases and kill plants. In addition, coffee fertilizer is not suitable for tradescantia, asparagus, geraniums and other crops that prefer more alkaline soil. Top dressing from pomace can change the shade of rose flowers.

Helpful Hints

Dried coffee grounds are very light, so when used dry, even the slightest breeze can blow them off the garden. To prevent this from happening, it is recommended to mix the cake with earth or sawdust and close it shallowly into the soil.

If the color of the leaves of the plants has changed after treatment with coffee grounds, the use of coffee grounds as a fertilizer should be discontinued. You can carefully strain the coffee infusion and use only liquid for irrigation, and use the thick, for example, to feed conifers.

It is recommended to prepare fertilizer from coffee grounds for summer cottages, using cake from the preparation of only natural coffee. Instant powder and granulated coffee is not advisable to use for this purpose, since their nutritional value is not great.

How to use coffee pomace - coffee grounds as fertilizer or scrub

Average coffee consumption is between 3 and 12 kg per person per year. But few people know that this drink is worth appreciating not only for its taste. After all, coffee grounds are beneficial. This is an important component that can and should be used in everyday life.

It is easy to make fertilizer, pest control, deodorant, and face and body mask from the cake. And these are just some of the ideas: how to use the leftover coffee from the coffee machine. After all, cake consists of moderately solid particles, and also contains a lot of trace elements and antioxidants. It is an indispensable helper in everyday life.

Coffee grounds as a fertilizer

Cake contains a lot of trace elements. Therefore, gardeners use coffee as a fertilizer. This approach allows you to saturate the soil with useful substances without chemicals:

Coffee residues from a bean coffee machine are also rich in other trace elements. Therefore, cake is used as an organic fertilizer for plants. But you can’t just take it and put it in the soil. Make compost from spent coffee. Several methods can be used for this:

Important: never pour coffee waste from the coffee machine directly into the ground. After all, cake has a pH of 5.5-5.9. Its use in its raw form will lead to soil acidification. To avoid this, the thick must be dried beforehand. Then its pH softens to 6.5-6.8.

Now the owners of suburban areas and just lovers of indoor plants know exactly what to do with coffee cake. But in order not to harm the plants, you should remember the prohibitions:

Don't forget: if you are using coffee grounds as a fertilizer, it is important to follow the correct watering technique. The soil should dry out well. If the surface is always kept wet, midges can start.

The benefits of coffee grounds for plants are invaluable. In addition to saturating the soil with minerals, the cake attracts with such useful properties:

As you can see, the benefits of coffee grounds for plants have been proven. It is an important component of complex fertilizers and an effective mono-element. The main thing is to use it correctly.

Coffee grounds for flowers

Cake is used as a basic element of complex top dressing. Use coffee as a houseplant fertilizer if you're into azaleas, begonias, camellias, rhododendrons, hydrangeas, and other flowers. To get the result, it is important to use coffee correctly. Fertilizer for plants is used in accordance with the following recommendations:

Don't forget: coffee is a fertilizer for flowers that love acidic soil. Therefore, it can be used for almost all indoor plants. The exception is geranium and pelargonium.

Useful for coffee roses, peonies, lilies, hostas, tulips and ornamental shrubs. For perennial herbaceous plants, chrysanthemums, asters and dahlias, such an additive is rarely used.

But is it possible to fertilize flowers with coffee grounds without using other additives? Experienced flower growers agree with the benefits of cake. But they recommend using it as a supplement to standard dressings.

Coffee grounds as a fertilizer for the garden

Experienced gardeners know exactly which plants coffee grounds are good for and which vegetables/fruits do not like them. If you want to saturate the soil with microelements, you should use a mixture of cake and compost, ash or soil.

Coffee as a fertilizer for the garden is chosen for the following crops:

Coffee pomace is also used for strawberries, blueberries, lingonberries and cranberries. These plants respond well to soil acidification, begin to grow actively and bear fruit vigorously.

Coffee grounds are popular among gardeners as a fertilizer for cucumbers. After all, these vegetables are extremely sensitive to growing conditions. The cake attracts earthworms. They improve the quality of the soil, saturating it with beneficial bacteria and improving ventilation.

Important: when using coffee in the garden, always mix the grounds with grass or compost. In no case do not pour cake directly onto the ground. Indeed, after watering, it can form a crust, which will impair the ventilation of the roots.

Coffee as fertilizer for seedlings

Seeds need energy to germinate. Therefore, many use coffee as a fertilizer for seedlings. It can be applied in several ways:

Dried coffee grounds are widely used as garden fertilizer. But it is worth remembering that such top dressing is prohibited when growing asparagus.

Coffee grounds against pests

Insects and other garden dwellers cause damage by destroying crops. In order not to use aggressive chemicals, summer residents use coffee from ants and other pests. The specifics of application depend on the type of insects to be repelled:

Coffee grounds help against ants and other insects. Cake is also used to scare away yard cats who decide to mark the site. Mix the grounds with orange peel, and scatter in places where an unpleasant odor is concentrated. This processing will prevent the appearance of repeated marks.

Coffee grounds in cosmetology

Coffee pomace is used in the beauty industry. This is a coffee mask for cellulite, a cleansing scrub, as well as face and hair products. After all, coffee is rich in antioxidants. It effectively cleanses and tones the skin.

Coffee grounds are also used in cosmetology due to their unique texture. Fine cake is strong enough to eliminate dead particles. But at the same time, coffee waste has a delicate texture and does not damage the skin. This allows you to use the thick as scrubs and masks.

Beauticians are sure: the benefits of coffee grounds are undeniable. After all, ground coffee beans have a range of positive effects:

But for the use of coffee grounds to be beneficial, it is important to properly prepare it by combining it with other ingredients. Oil, cream and useful components should be added to it.

Coffee grounds body scrub

Good cleansing is the key to healthy skin. Therefore, the scrub from the waste of the coffee machine should be prepared correctly. Popular recipes:

The same recipe as the coffee grounds scrub for cellulite with honey can be prepared with a yoghurt-based composition. It is suitable for those who are allergic to bee products. There are many more ideas on what to mix coffee with for a scrub. You can use cottage cheese, oatmeal, fruit puree, cosmetic clay, etc.

Important: after the preparation of cosmetic products, there are often leftovers. But how do you properly store your coffee scrub? To do this, it is necessary to properly prepare it. Be sure to dry the cake before use. Only then mix the ingredients. Excess scrub should be placed in a glass or plastic container and put in the refrigerator.

Coffee grounds face mask

Many beauticians use only anti-cellulite coffee masks. But the cake has a lot more useful properties. Therefore, experienced craftsmen recommend using face masks based on coffee grounds:

Important: before using coffee pomace, it must be dried. The exception is a rejuvenating mask. In other cases, the thick is added to the composition of cosmetic products without excess moisture.

Coffee pomace against cellulite

Orange peel on the thighs and buttocks gives a lot of inconvenience. An anti-cellulite mask with coffee will help get rid of it. It is better to apply it immediately after bath procedures on warm and well-cleansed skin. In this case, the product is not left on the body, but gently massaged on the surface. This improves local metabolism.

Using coffee pomace against cellulite is easy. It is enough to choose 1 of the popular recipes:

Now you know what can be done with coffee waste to eliminate aesthetic problems. After all, cake has a complex effect, restores the hydro-lipid balance and eliminates excess subcutaneous fat. It is an important assistant in the fight against cellulite.

Coffee cake for hair

The special texture of coffee grounds allows for gentle scalp care. You can use coffee grounds for hair in its pure form. Simply apply it to the hair at the roots and gently massage into the scalp. So you eliminate the remnants of pollution, get rid of excess sebum and dead skin particles.

A coffee pomace hair mask is also useful. For its preparation, several recipes can be used:

Now you know what to do with old coffee to improve the condition of your hair. If you want to increase the effectiveness of the mask, you should add 1 tbsp to the traditional recipe. l. burdock oil.

Home use of coffee grounds

The use of coffee in everyday life is not limited to cosmetology and gardening. Also, cake is used in such situations: