Video:How to Use Coffee Grounds in the Garden

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Transcript:How to Use Coffee Grounds in the Garden

Important Nutrients in Coffee

If you make a daily pot of coffee, you have fabulous organic matter right at your fingertips. Although coffee grounds are brown in color, but in compost jargon, they are "green," meaning an item that is rich in nitrogen.

Coffee grounds contain approximately 1.45 % nitrogen. They also contain "magnesium", "calcium", "potassium", and other trace minerals.

Compost and Coffee Ground

There are several ways you can use coffee grounds in your garden: Put coffee grounds in your compost bin. They are a valuable source of nitrogen.

Add grounds directly into the top couple inches of the soil in your garden. Or just sprinkle the grounds on top and leave it alone.

Coffee and Pests

Create a slug-and-snail-barrier. Coffee grounds are both abrasive and acidic, so a barrier of grounds placed near slug-prone plants may just save them from these garden pests.

Coffee Ground Fertilizer

Make coffee ground "tea" fertilizer. Add two cups of used coffee grounds to a five-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.

Coffee Grounds for Worms

Worms love coffee grounds! Add them to your worm bin. 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.

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