What a great way to finish off 2011 – with a Ground to Ground article on the well respected Earth Garden magazine (Summer, No 158).
Among the many other excellent articles, I discuss why collecting coffee grounds is a good thing to be doing, what you can do with them, and why you should join me.
Go on check it out!
Related articles
- The Herb Garden (groundtoground.org)
- Cliff Hanger Garden Bed (shamanicgardener.wordpress.com)
- The Colors of Life (strawberryindigo.wordpress.com)
Ground to Ground 
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I am collecting roughly 80L per fortnight of used coffee grounds. Now I have read that coffee is considered a ‘Green’ in the compost heap – having a higher ratio of Nitrogen. So now I am stuck with a composting problem. I can only put so much coffee in my compost bin. So i am thinking of other ways to compost this vast quantity of grounds. One option is worm farming. But even if I use a worm farm I still need massive quantities of ‘Brown’ carbon materials to balance out the coffee. Any thoughts? One thought I had was to collect the used paper hand towels from the office bathroom waste paper bin. Any other ideas for easy to source ‘Browns’ in bulk? Newspaper is one – but im not keen on the ink getting into my organic compost.
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My son has a part time job in a fast food place that sells coffee. He is now bringing home the grounds for me when he works late shifts.
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Excellent news Donna. You will find that coffee grounds are great in your garden and of course by doing this you are reducing the contribution to landfill. Happy to do a story on the fast food place on this site if your son is interested?
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Pingback: Thank you for collecting used coffee grounds in 2011 | Coffee Grounds to Ground
Great article Shane. I am posting a link to it on our own internal site as I reckon this is a good introduction to coffee grounds
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Thank you Sam. Link away my friend, link away 🙂
And besides, took me a bloody long time to get that one right so nice to know you see it that way.
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My Great-grand mother (G2Mom) use to drink a lot of coffee and had plenty leftover coffee grounds. She would put them all over the shrubs and even though I was very young I could notice her flowers were the healthiest and strongest in the neighborhood – I should know because when my friends and I played baseball and the ball would go in my G2Mom’s shrubs the ball or the kids had a harder time getting through; while, at other homes given the same issue, the shrubs would fall apart…and when the flowers would bloom no one wanted to play at G2Mom’s house because we all agreed the flowers looked so beautiful.
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Nice one hero!! G2Mom got it.
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Coffee grounds are my garden’s best friend also. In Florida, the first step is creating soil out of the sand! Starbucks has been my main source for the coffee grounds, they package it nice bags that make it easy to pick up and use when I’, ready to use them. It makes a nice compost tea with alfalfa and sea kelp soaking in a lidded container for about one week.
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Thanks for the tip Melinda. I’ve heard it mentioned a few times now that coffee grounds will work out to a nice compost tea, but yet to actually try it. Is that all you do with it – just add it into water with those things for a week?
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