Feeding the garden

One of our favorite "foods" for the beds and gardens is coffee grounds. A lot of coffee shops are happy to offer them for free as they normally just throw them in the garbage and, in many cases, it saves them money be reducing the amount of trash their contractors have to pick up.

The Starbucks we visited from time to time near our previous home put out bags of grounds labelled "grounds for your garden" and they were free. The bags in the photo are from our neighborhood coffeeshop, Smelly Cat. They put out their grounds separate from their garbage for anyone to grab. Normally I take our wheelbarrow there on Sundays (we live a block away) and grab what is out there. We either add them directly to our compost, like I was in this photo. They have their paper filters mixed in, which are also fine for the compost. Often during the growing seasons we'll sift out plain grounds to put around our plants in the beds and put the filters in the compost - nice little feeding boost and good organic material.

Coffee grounds aren't as acidic as one might think, most of the acid is removed in the brewing process, and they have a good nitrogen content for feeding plants. Added benefit, slugs and snails don't like to be around coffee grounds, great deterrent for these enemies of the garden!