Coffee Break

I love a good bucket of coffee in the morning. For my garden I mean... anyone who knows me understands that I can't handle more than one caffeine hit a day or they have to scrape me off the walls! I had heard that coffee grinds were good for the soil, but of course, my one cup a day habit doesn't really produce enough for a whole garden.

 

So when my friend Michael opened Cravings coffee shop in East Perth, I had a proposal for him. Michael was more than happy to give me all his used coffee grinds! Now every other day after bootcamp I wander all sweaty into his shop with a big empty bucket and swap it for a big bucket full of coffee. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement - I get the grinds for my garden - he doesn't have to put about 6 - 8 kilos of coffee a day into the rubbish bin. When you think about all the coffee shops across Perth, that's a LOT of waste going to landfill, that could be helping our soil!

 

Here's today's bucket of grinds:

 

I was first attracted to coffee as a deterrent for slugs and snails in the garden. The beagles had an expensive emergency trip to the vet surgery to have their stomachs pumped a couple of years ago after eating what was sold to me as "PET FRIENDLY" snail pellets. Yep, I still don't quite understand what was friendly about seeing your dog almost die. That horror aside, I started using coffee around the plants I needed to protect from snails... and for most the part it worked! Luckily Chilli and Mustard don't like coffee... I think a beagle high on caffeine would be more than I could handle!

 

So, how do you use coffee in your garden? If you just have the odd cup, don't wash the grinds down the drain, fill the coffee pot up with water and pour it over your pot plants, or around your herbs. If, like me, you have access to industrial quantities of the stuff, you can add it straight to your soil.Treat it like a soil conditioner... don't add too much and just scratch a bit into the top layer of your soil. Or you can scatter a ring of coffee around your seedlings to protect them from snails, you can add it to your compost - treat it like a nitrogen, not a carbon, so be sure to add plenty of dry leaves, straw etc into the mix... and maybe a handful of lime. Also, if you have a worm farm, put some grinds in there... the worms go nuts for it... but again, not too much. Too much of anything in the garden can disturb the soil balance.

 

So there you have it... next time you pop into your local coffee spot, ask if they'd mind setting aside their grinds for you once in a while. It's good for your garden, and good for the planet as well!