Last month I wrote a post on whether instant coffee was really better for the environment than filter. Now I wasn’t negative about environmental issues, but I thought I should still play it safe and write something environmentally friendly, to avoid an arrest warrant being issued by the environmental police.

As a coffee lover, I drink a lot of coffee and so accumulate a lot of used coffee grounds. Now usually I just dump these in my garden waste bin and let the council take care of it. But I’ve been thinking, there must be some better use for them.

From researching on the internet it seems many people actually use their coffee grounds on their garden. Now I’m pretty sure that after being roasted and brewed, grounds will have little nutritional value to add to soil – it’s not going to be high in nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium (NPK). But as grounds are quite similar in texture to sand they may help improve the soil structure, particularly if you have clay soil.

Now I have a patch of grass which is suffering some what. I grew it from seed a couple of years ago, but it’s never seemed to flourish. Its not the greenest of grass (in fact its quite yellow in places) and its full of weeds. I think the main problem, apart from not getting much sun, is drainage. So I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to test my grounds on. See if the coffee can make an improvement before opting for ‘Plan B’ – some grass coloured paint!
 
So since New Year, I’ve been collecting all my used grounds in a bucket, stored in my shed. To prevent the grounds going mouldy, but also to make sure they weren’t too wet, I thought I’d better add some horticultural grit (roughly one part coffee to one part grit). Then last weekend, I forked over the grass and spread the coffee grounds on top. Before brushing as much as possible into the holes.
 
Obviously, this isn’t going to be some miracle cure. Its not like the Evergreen ads where my lawn will be greener than a St Andrews’ fairway in less than 7 days. As the growing season for grass typically doesn’t start till April, I think it’ll be at least a couple of months before I notice any difference. So I think i’ll do a progress post in May.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.