Benefits and Dangers of COFFEE GROUNDS and WOOD ASH in the Garden // Beginning Gardening

Funny coffee grounds story. I decided I could throw the coffee grounds over the deck, and eventually go collect it. And I got up, brewed, and drank my coffee at the same time everyday. I started noticing a mouse near the coffee grounds, no problem, I just ignored him. One day I slept in. He was outside waiting, and was yelling at me. i had a coffee addicted mouse.

garden and coffee ground story.. I used to have an open compost pile where I would put food scraps including coffee filters full of coffee grounds. One day when I went to dump more I noticed that some critter had cleaned out ALL the grounds leaving only the paper filter. I kept an eye on the pile and witnessed the local flock of crows taking turns cleaning out every spec of grounds. I then dubbed the pile "The Crow Cafe". One day when returning from town I got out of the car and was accosted by a barrage of screaming crows gathered around the Crow Cafe. I then realized I had not taken out the compost for 3 days and I was being informed that I was slacking on my duties.. After further thought I decided to enclose the compost pile so local wildlife could not get to the pile.. for their health reasons and because the last thing the neighborhood needed was a flock of caffeine addicted crows.

We struggled with blueberries on my property for many years, my husband simply gave up on them. Then, I discovered a nice trick. In the fall, I mulched the blueberry beds with a thick layer of green pine needles. Then, in the springtime when the buds are starting to fatten up, I “wake up” the blueberries by watering them with water steeped in one cup of fresh coffee grounds. The coffee brings the ph right to the perfect level. They’ve never looked better!

My wife has been dumping coffee grounds off the back porch, in the same spot for 20 years. Underneath are the largest night crawlers you have ever seen. Good fishing bait.

One year I added homemade compost which had coffee grounds under a hydrangea. The resulting pH balance gave blooms that were half pink and half blue on the same blooms! Very beautiful and happy accident!

My Dad had a wonderful vegetable garden when I was a kid.  The first year we lived there he rented a rototiller and taught us how to turn a 1/4 acre of our property into a garden breaking up the old sod that used to be part of the meadow out back.  The soil was rich, nearly black and we discovered it went down about five feet before we hit a three foot layer of orange clay followed by all sand under that.  We learned this when he dug the well.  Fortunately he only had to dig down about nine feet before we hit water.  Then my Dad went insane and started doing things that were absolutely crazy.  Now we had moved in September so it was too late to plant that year.  Everything we were doing was to prepare for the first year.  When the town advertised that they were accepting bids to clean up the old bonfire pit behind the high school my dad underbid everyone and basically only bid enough to rent the truck.  My brother, Dad and I spent every weekend until October shoveling ash into that truck.  Then we'd drive home and dump it all into the garden and do it again.  Before the first snow we hit another part of the property and my brother and I had to rake away about 1/4 acre of pine needles to expose what was under the needles.  He called it pine "humus" but I'm not sure if that's the correct term.  We must have made hundreds of trips with the wheel barrow dumping all that into the garden.  Next my dad found out about a poultry farm that supplied most of the eggs to the town as well as powdered eggs to the military.  When you are in the business of making powdered eggs you end up with a lot of shells.  My Dad went to talk to the owner and nest thing I knew my brother and I were shoveling tons of broken chicken egg shells into drums.  I'm glad we were only a quarter of a mile away.   That's a long way to roll a 55 gallon steel drum for an 11 year old but egg shells don't weight much so it wasn't that heavy.  finally the following February my mother had become friends with a woman who had horses.  She'd kept horses there for a dozen years and had mounds of horse poop for each year she was there.  She ran out of space and was going to hire someone to lug it all away.  Well you guessed it.  Dad made a deal with her and got the whole load and got paid for it to boot.  We put the newest three mounds into our newly formed compost pile an took the other nine years worth and spread it into our garden.  My Dad called the above mixture "Super Dirt."  So anyways, between a heavier than usual early spring rain and a sunnier than usual late spring by July we were growing 7 foot tomato trees with two inch diameter stalks, Cucumbers the size of Zucchini and Zucchini the size of Watermelon.  We had foot long green beans and Roma tomatoes that were six inches long.  My mom had three foot marigold bushes.  Our strawberries were the size of small apples and deep red to the core.  And out of only about twenty corn stalks we got about 60 huge ears of corn.  When my uncle came to visit (he's from Nebraska) he exclaimed that our garden was impossible and that he demanded to know from which secret government lab my Dad stole the corn seeds from.  Dad grew about twenty other vegetables that I don't remember all of them and he mixed the soil additives differently for each patch of the garden.  He did the whole thing very scientifically despite being functionally illiterate having struggled through six years of high school to come out with a C- average before being drafted for the Korean War.  He had been raised on a farm with poor Cape Cod sandy soil and apparently learned a few tricks.  One thing though.  In subsequent years he always dumped the contents of the barbecue grill into the garden with no ill effects and he always grilled with charcoal briquets and that leads me to a question, why do you recommend not using charcoal briquets?  You merely say don't use them but you don't explain why.

I actually got in trouble with my landlord a little, using coffee grounds as an amendment. I was just using my grounds from my morning filter press coffee, pouring it around the base of some fruit trees we had in the back yard. The rental contract had the landlord taking care of the trees, and he came to me a couple months later, asking what the hell happened to the trees, as they were fruiting so prodigously, some of the branches were close to breaking. When I told him what I had been doing, he was just like, "please stop".

You & Noah are great together. You're blessed to have each other. Thanks for the info and the smiles.

Many years ago I lived in Tennessee and decided I was going to plant a dogwood tree in my yard. I dug a hole 4 in deeper than necessary, mixed used coffee grounds with rich soil to put in the bottom of the hole. I covered that with 2 in of soil and then made a mound to set my baby tree on. I think covered the rest of the root of the tree and watered well. With minimum maintenance I grew the most outstanding dogwood tree with the most brilliant pink flowers. It grew fast, tall and wide. All of those neighbors who told me that I could not grow a dogwood tree in that area of Tennessee were forever humbled because I told them I could and I did

I homeschool and we’re doing this next week. Howwww awesome!

I go to the local Cumberland Farms and get the full trash bags of grounds. They are more then happy to give them to you. I add this bag to my compost pile and allow it to be worked in over the next few months.

Who needs a TV, when you can be doing this. Free fun, with education

Just want to say that everything presented here is fully substantiated by various scientific papers coming out of agricultural colleges and county extension agencies. You have obviously done your homework. We need more presentations like this. Keep up the good work.

After planting a number of new pines in my backyard, I heard pines love coffee grounds. I started collected the grounds for a couple days at a time and then threw them on top of the soil under these new plantings. After just a couple years, the pines went from about 5 ft to 25 ft. I was amazed. I stopped after two or three years and started putting them, along with other vegetable scraps, into vermiculture compost bins. Those bins turned into a 5 ft diameter leaf, grass, and kitchen scrap pile. This large compost pile has now survived a couple cold winters. It creates enough heat to stay above 50 degrees which is fine for the worms. The only problem is the decomposition heat during the summer. When it gets to hot, I try breaking it up to slow down the chemistry. Several times, the temps have gotten as high as 140 degrees. I figured my worms were all dead. But, no, some seem to migrate to a bit cool spot where they survive. The final compost is fabulous.

Love when you two hang out doing videos.

I make many layers in my compost: hay from Craig's list for free...cold, old manure, not fresh... forest soil because of the microorganisms... sand for the worms...coffee grounds from the coffee shop... worms from an old pile... weeds,early summer weeds if you want to keep out the seeds... mulched leaves...algae scrapped off the surface of my pond... greens the local grocery store throws out. Keep it damp. You don't have to turn it. Add lots of greens just before winter and in any pile that the worms have depleted of them. Put layers of plastic and hay on top in the winter. I put three layers where I live because it gets down to 15 below zero. Use the piles you started first last Summer and you'll have great potting soil and compost.

My Grandfather always grew a huge garden. He used egg shells, coffee grounds, tea leaves, vegetable peels and ends from the kitchen, and leaves. He would let them sit and compost after each growing season until the next growing season.

the first garden I ever did, I put a bunch of ashes in the soil and the garden went nuts! best garden I have ever had. I have been chasing that success ever since.

Thanks! I'm a beginner, we just started container gardening yesterday! I'm enjoying learning lots of new information about gardening!

red cabbage is also a great pH indicator. Red cabbage contains a water-soluble pigment called anthocyanin that changes color when it is mixed with an acid or a base. The pigment turns red in acidic environments with a pH less than 7 and the pigment turns bluish-green in alkaline (basic), environments with a pH greater than 7.