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Which plants benefit from coffee grounds


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.

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Table of Contents

the pros and cons of using coffee in the garden and in the garden - an article on the TCHK

The advice not to throw away the coffee pulp, but to take it under the tomato bush can be found in many collections of non-traditional uses of coffee. Compost, fertilizer, insecticide and soil acidifier - a variety of useful properties are attributed to this product. In fact, everything is not as simple as it seems at first glance. Below, we will look at a few of the main arguments for using coffee in the garden and see which ones should be treated with caution.

Is coffee a useful fertilizer?

There is a common belief that coffee grounds can act as an ideal natural way to feed the beds: they contain about 3% of useful micronutrients, including magnesium, potassium, calcium and phosphorus, as well as nitrogen. However, "natural" does not mean "safe" and "useful".

According to a 2016 study by Australian scientists, recommendations for using used coffee grounds either directly in the soil or as compost should be considered... anecdotal. Empirically, the Australians have found that this kind of "fertilizer" not only does not improve growth rates, but even reduces them.

Why? Looks like it's all about the caffeine. There is a lot of it even in the sleeping coffee grounds. Now raise your hand if you remember that caffeine is toxic to other non-caffeine plants. In addition, coffee grounds have antibacterial properties, which negatively affects the natural processes characteristic of composting.

However, one cannot fail to mention exceptions. According to the experience of experienced flower growers, azaleas, roses, hydrangeas and camellias respond well to such top dressing, increasing the number of buds. I like the coffee diet and evergreen shrubs, as well as ferns.

Coffee acidifies alkaline soil

One of the most common gardening tips about coffee grounds is to use them to acidify the soil. It seems to make sense: everyone knows that coffee is sour. The question is how sour the thick will be.

It turns out not very good.

Although the caffeine is still present in this product, the acid present in the grain is water soluble. Therefore, our drink becomes sour, and not the used grounds, which have a pH close to neutral (from 6. 5 to 6.8 pH).

The conclusion is obvious. Coffee as an acidifier is pure myth. The used grounds practically do not have the acidic properties of the drink.

Coffee keeps pests away

Really, it does. After all, caffeine is toxic not only to plants, but also to insects. Scientists have already proven that coffee grounds are very effective against bugs and midges. There is a version that it also helps to drive away slugs and snails, but this hypothesis requires additional research.

Coffee is an effective soil conditioner

On the one hand, yes, the coffee grounds add some looseness. However, at the same time, its toxic properties continue to work, which means that the active use of such an additive will destroy the gardener's main friends - worms. Many Internet sources write that worms like coffee, but in reality, such a feast will have an extremely negative impact on their health. Well, then it’s easy to calculate: no worms - no natural “baking powder”.

Coffee against weeds

As we remember, caffeine inhibits plant growth. This property is very useful when it is necessary to destroy weeds. In order to achieve the desired effect, it is necessary to cover the soil with coffee grounds where harmful plants are completely unbound, but at the same time away from useful plantings.

Coffee is likely to really deal with weeds. But where is the line between the "garbage" in the garden and your favorite cucumbers?

As you can see, using coffee in the garden is not easy: there are not only pluses, but also minuses that must be taken into account when conducting experiments.

If you want to find a useful use for coffee grounds, make a scrub out of it. Or use for house cleaning. How exactly - we wrote in this article.

Coffee grounds as fertilizer for indoor flowers and gardeners in 2022 on the Gudgront

Content

All this is possible thanks to useful substances contained in coffee grounds. You can talk a lot about the beneficial properties of sleeping coffee and its use as a fertilizer for indoor flowers and garden plants, but this issue should be dealt with in more detail.

Benefits of coffee grounds

Ground coffee contains a lot of valuable substances. This is:

Undoubtedly, during the brewing process, some of these substances are washed out of the coffee grounds. The content of useful mineral components in sleeping coffee is approximately 2-3% (for different substances it is different). But even this amount is enough to use coffee grounds as a mineral fertilizer for home and garden flowers, vegetables, and ornamental plants. The substances contained in coffee waste are essential for their growth and development.

For example, nitrogen plays a key role in the process of photosynthesis, without which plant growth and the formation of oxygen are impossible. Phosphorus and potassium are also involved in this important process, contribute to the development of the plant, the formation of flowers and fruits.

Using dormant coffee as fertilizer is a virtually free way to provide your plants with healthy mineral nutrition.

At the same time, the probability of harming them from an overdose of one or another component is equal to zero. The concentration of minerals in the thick is optimal for many indoor flowers, garden and garden plants.

Potted flowers are particularly susceptible to coffee ground fertilizer:

A good result is the use of dormant coffee to feed vegetables, including:

This fertilizer is suitable for garden roses, lilies, ornamental shrubs, herbs.

Drinking coffee is an excellent means of feeding fruit and berry bushes and trees. After its application, the yield of these crops increases.

It is believed that coffee residues are highly acidic and therefore unsuitable for many plant species. This is not entirely true. The grains do have a high acidity. However, excess acid is washed out during the brewing process. Coffee grounds have a neutral level of acidity and as a fertilizer it is suitable for feeding any plants.

Use of coffee grounds as fertilizer

Coffee grounds are used to fertilize plants in two ways:

  1. Liquid food. This method is very simple. It consists in the fact that coffee residues (thickness and part of the liquid) are collected in one container. Then this composition is watered on the ground in flower pots or under garden plants. This method has one significant disadvantage: a wet substance is prone to infection with mold or fungi. Therefore, to fertilize potted plants, it is recommended to use dry top dressing.

    Helpful Hint: To fertilize garden beds or garden shrubs, thin out the grounds until they are ready to be watered. Water the plants from above with a watering can, then pour plain water over them. This will allow the minerals to slowly release into the soil, nourishing your plants.

  2. Dry dressing. Dry the coffee beans thoroughly before use. To do this, after draining a small amount of thick, evenly distribute it on a sheet of thick cardboard or waterproof paper. You can use plastic spacing or baking sheets from the oven. Place the prepared thick in a warm place and keep it there until completely dry. When the substance dries, do not forget to break the caked lumps. Fertilizer can be used immediately or stored in dry glass, plastic or tin cans with tight-fitting lids. Thick paper bags are also suitable for this purpose.

Use of coffee grounds in the garden

Dried dry coffee is poured under the plant, then the soil is slightly loosened. When watering, useful substances will be released and flow into the ground, gradually enriching it.

When using this fertilizer in the garden, it is dug into the ground under the plants. With the help of a shovel, the earth is dug up to a depth of about 5 cm. Dry thickening is added to the loose soil. For one tree - 1-2 glasses, depending on the size. Then the thick is sprinkled with earth and lightly tamped.

Helpful hint: don't put too much ground (so that it covers all the ground under the plant). In this case, when watering, a crust may form, which will interfere with the access of oxygen to the roots. Do not add thickening to the soil for seedlings. It will weigh down the soil and slow down germination.

Sleeping coffee for flowers

Coffee sludge is especially popular as a fertilizer for indoor plants and garden flowers. For fertilizing indoor flowers, it is recommended to prepare the following composition:

Mix all the ingredients and let them rot. To do this, you can use a large tank or an old pan. The mixture should be covered with fertile soil on top, make several holes with a stick and let it mature for about a month. The resulting composition can be used as nutritional supplements, making them into flower pots.

When planting flower beds and laying flower beds, coffee residues can also be used. Forming a flower garden, add them to the ground. On a bucket of earthen mixture, you should take one glass of dry thick, mix everything thoroughly, after which you can plant flowers. After planting the plants, the soil must be watered abundantly.

Coffee pomace as compost

Minerals, primarily nitrogen, contained in coffee residues tend to be released gradually under the influence of microorganisms. This makes coffee pomace a valuable component of garden compost. To do this, it is collected and placed in a compost pit. Thick contributes to the speedy decay of the contents of the pit, improves its mineral composition.

Coffee pomace can also be added directly to planting holes for garden ornamental and fruit-bearing plants. To do this, dry cake is mixed with prepared soil. A plant is planted in the prepared soil and watered abundantly.

Helpful Hint: Try using compost containing coffee residue to grow mushrooms. According to the reviews of those who used this method, the yield increases by 2-3 times.

How else to use grounds

Coffee grounds can not only enrich plants with useful minerals, but also protect them from a wide variety of pests. Insects such as ants, slugs, snails, aphids and others do not like it. Using grounds allows you to safely and inexpensively protect your plantings. It can also be used to prevent the appearance of insect pests.

Coffee grounds may just be indispensable in your garden. This is an excellent tool for changing the structure of the soil. Adding thickening will make heavy and clayey garden soil looser and lighter. To do this, the cake is added to the soil and regularly loosened.

Drinking coffee and coffee residues can also attract beneficial insects. Including earthworms. This property is especially important for composting. Worms, processing the contents of the compost pit, loosening it, contribute to the rapid maturation of the compost.

Cats do not like coffee aroma. With the help of thick, you can wean your pet from shitting under your favorite bush. You just need to sprinkle a dry product in a thin layer and do not water for a while.

Where to get enough grounds

First of all, do not throw away after drinking the drink itself. So, in a few days you can collect a sufficient amount of thick. Good for use as a fertilizer or compost cake from a coffee machine.

In some cafes and restaurants abroad, and in our country, a special table has recently appeared with packages that say "Coffee grounds for your plants" or "Coffee scrub for you." They are a useful and pleasant present for visitors to the institution.

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