Sprout Up Your Garden with Barnie’s Coffee Grounds

The next time you finish your morning coffee, think twice before you toss those used coffee grounds into your trash. Coffee grounds have several benefits in the garden. They enrich the soil with nitrogen, potassium and other minerals, improve soil quality and plant growth.

If you put coffee grounds under your plants, it will provide the plants with nitrogen, magnesium, potassium iron, phosphorus, and chromium, which will not only help maintain the nutrient level but help the plants thrive.

To use coffee grounds as a fertilizer, sprinkle them thinly onto the soil (as picture is shown), or add them to your compost heap. Despite their color, to compost, they are green! Or nitrogen-rich organic material.

Have the kids paint their own pots for planting their seeds. It makes for a great art activity for them, too.

Coffee grounds are also acidic, adding it to your garden soil or garden bed will help to maintain the acidity of the soil. Your acid-loving plants like hydrangeas, azaleas, lily of the valley, blueberries, carrots, and radishes can get a boost from fresh grounds.

1. Coffee grounds provide Nitrogen boost to plants

Nitrogen craving vegetables include corn, spinach, tomatoes, any leafy vegetable and flowers like camellias, roses, rhododendrons, and azaleas thrive in nitrogen-rich soil. Adding coffee grounds to these plants will give them a boost.

2. Use it as a natural insect repellent

Ants, snails or slugs can attack the vegetable garden. But you can keep them away if you place small amounts of coffee grounds near the mound of the invaded plants. Scatter it around to provide a natural barrier for this garden pests. It may also possibly work to deter ants.

3. Prevent plant infection with fungi

Coffee grounds prevent plants from fungi infection, but especially their roots and stems. All you have to do is to add a layer of compost mixed with coffee grounds or to occasionally sprinkle coffee grounds at the plant's base.

4. Add to your compost or worm bin

This is a simple method for adding a source of nitrogen to your compost.

5. Use it as a mulch

Coffee grounds can be used as a natural mulch! We’ve used it around berry bushes and fruit trees with good results.

6. Feed your flowers

Flowers such as roses, rhododendrons, and azaleas prefer acidic soil. Sprinkle and then lightly work in coffee grounds near the base of your flowers to help feed them.

Coffee grounds are free organic matter, whether a by-product of your at-home daily brew or collected from our coffee shop on Park Avenue in Winter, Park, Florida. They are a worthwhile addition to your compost heap and your soil. This will surely get your garden sprouting!

TIP: If you don’t drink coffee, you can get the grounds for free from Barnie’s Cafe on Park Avenue in Winter Park, Florida. We’d be happy to give them to you regularly.