Tips: Coffee Gardening

Video by Melissa McGinnis – twitter.com Blog by Joe Laur – twitter.com Boy, Melissa must drink enough coffee to keep a whole neighborhood of Starbucks gong. Or at least she finds enough uses for grounds that throwing them away should never be an option. Theres a lot of interesting things in this video post- from the ant endorsement that coffee grounds produce to the help for the bloomin flowers. According to Doug Greens Easy Gifts Farm, theres solid evidence that green gardeners should be reusing this waste to resource stream in the garden. The site says that research on slugs and alkaloid shows that concentrations of alkaloid as low as .01 % reduces feeding by slugs . But those concentrations dont kill. It takes 1-2% alkaloid solutions to kill slugs as effectively as the chemicals normally used, but at that strength it can alteration plant leaves. Coffee grounds contain about 05% caffeine. So coffee grounds will not kill slugs but can deter them from your plants. Nice. Chases them away without slug murder. How very vegan. And apparently coffee grounds make great mulch, particularly for plants that like acidic soils. The site says that they are acidic with a pH of between 3.0 and 5.0 creating them superb for mulching rhododendrons, azalea and other acid loving plants. And you can scatter them thinly all over the rest of your garden as organic soil amendments. You need to add inches of the stuff to change the pH. As Melissa state, worms love coffee grounds and gardeners and …