You often throw away a lot of organic matter that is a great blessing for your garden—for instance, used coffee grounds. They are your plant’s best friends, and knowing their benefits; you will never toss them away in the dustbin.
Here are some mind-blowing ideas that can turn your kitchen waste into fertilizer.
1. Coffee Grounds as Natural Fertilizer
Fertilizers provide essential nutrients to plants and help them grow properly.
With time plants absorb the nutrients from the soil and leave it depleted.
Using fertilizers helps to nourish the soil and ensure that your plants thrive, even in the harshest weather conditions. They may also absorb the heavy metals that contaminate the soil.
There is nothing better when fertilizers come from a natural source because they are less likely to overload your plants, provide effective nutrients for plant growth and can easily withstand rainstorms which is certainly impossible for chemical fertilizers.
Used coffee is a rich source of nitrogen, as well as traces of calcium, iron, potassium, chromium, magnesium, and phosphorous. You need to sprinkle them around the plant, and regular watering will automatically mix with the soil to make it into a natural fertilizer.
2. An Excellent Pest Repellent
Coffee contains caffeine and diterpenes, which is highly toxic to pests and insects. It also repels insects like beetles, flies, mosquitoes, etc., away. Scattering coffee grounds in an organised manner also helps in creating a barrier for slugs and snails, as they don’t like to crawl near coffee. However, this claim lacks detailed research, and many experts firmly believe it’s just a myth and may not work expectedly.
3. Coffee Attracts Worms
Pests ruin gardens, but worms flourish them. It’s a universal fact, but maintaining a select variety of worms is tedious, and most people find that disgusting. But what if those worms automatically get attracted to your garden?
Adding a cup of used coffee grounds to the soil every week will work. However, please don’t overdo it because the increased acidity due to the beans might trouble the worms.
Worms get attracted to these coffee bean grounds and help increase the soil’s nutrient ability, promote better drainage and leave a stable soil structure. Overall, it improves your farm productivity and allows you to grow and maintain your favourite plants easily.
4. Coffee Grounds Help in Composting
You can use your coffee grounds as compost as well. Composting is a process that turns natural waste products like vegetable or fruit peels, dried leaves, and any other organic matter into dark black material that is highly fertile for the plants.
To prepare the best compost, you must mix green and brown compost in a 1:4 ratio.
Coffee is brown, but technically it is termed green compost. Other items like dried leaves, newspapers, bark, herbs, egg shells, vegetable peels, bread, etc., types of organic matter are called brown compost.
Prepare the compost in a closed-lid air-tight plastic container, or get yourself a compost bin.Let the mixture rest for at least 6 to 8 weeks. Whenever you need the fertilizer, open the lid, mix it well and sprinkle it around your plants.
However, please do not use oils, dairy products, fish and meat scraps and diseased plants for the compost. They increase the amount of green compost and make the mixture smelly, promoting fungus and harmful bacteria.
5. Use fresh coffee in the garden
Many people wonder about the usage of fresh coffee beans for plants. You can use fresh coffee in your garden, but you must be highly selective about your choices. Fresh coffee is suitable in limited quantities but for acid-loving plants only, such as blueberries, hydrangeas, azaleas, rhododendrons, carrots, and radishes.
Be cautious and research before using fresh coffee in your garden. And never use it on new saplings or young plants, as it could hinder their growth and negatively impact their entire life cycle.
Buy Plant Fertilizers
We hope that you will now understand the process and benefits. Start by sprinkling the used coffee grounds for plants once a week. If you see noticeable benefits, then repeat. However, please be extremely cautious about using unbrewed coffee beans in your garden.
Moreover, if you are looking for diverse plant options and other garden equipment, please visit Ugaoo.com for a wide range of products at budgeted prices.
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