There was a long, detailed article today in Dave's Garden about using coffee grounds to feed one's plants.
Anybody have extensive experience with this? Mine is limited to dumping the grounds on Friday (when I make coffee for the gardener) on nearby plants, mostly the two side-door plants, Azalea and Hebe, as well as Roses in m rose path.
My question now relates to long-term, systematic use of coffee grounds on roses. I can pick up grounds from coffee shops (as mentioned in Dave's Garden article), but am looking for your real-world experience.
I live in So. Calif coastal. Soil is/was alkaline (adobe) but has been modified over many years by me and previous owner, so I think it's neutral (but should verify just for info).
So, if you're into coffee mulching, would you pls share your experience.
Work fine as a thickish mulch over fallow gardens. Fine coffee grounds are fine to spread across the lawn as fertiliser in the same manner you would any other fertiliser, just spread evenly and finely.
I've heard they can be very good for plants, and it's a good idea to put them in your composter as it'll mix the goodness in with the rest of the compost!
A useful property of coffee ground mulch is that it is anti-gastropod. So my coffee grounds go around my Lapageria rosea, which is otherwise the favourite food in the garden for the local snails.
I wouldn't consider used coffee grounds (UGC's) as a fertilizer - they are just too low in nutrients to be well-considered for this purpose (NPK =3D 2.0, .3, .3 approx.). You would probably need to supplement with something containing trace elements as well as higher concentrations of the big 3 (NPK). But as a soil amendment or compost additive, they are great. I would be cautious about using them as a mulch or very heavily as a mulch. If they are allowed to dry out, the surface becomes hydrophobic and repels water, which defeats one of the primary purposes of mulching. They do seem to have the ability to deter slugs and snails, but studies have shown that may be just the after-effects of the caffeine - supposedly spraying plants with stale coffee will have the same effect.
And remember that UGC's are pH neutral or just barely to the acidic side of the scale and are not of any particular help in lowering soil pH
if fallowing a garden over a season or more coffee grounds are fine as a mulch. I have done it a number of times and the garden and soil has been fine. Maybe not in a dry season I agree.
Anytime - supposedly some of my "local" places will do it too. I'll ask next spring.
Not sure where you are off the top of my head, but I'm in the frozen north. Shortly, I'll put out the driveway markers and such. All the garden ornaments are in or on the deck. (got this great brass colored whirling sunflower and it looks great in a pot the deck.
For those in the south... Drive way markers, I put mine out last week. These are useful to help find your driveway when then the snow comes around. Especially those that live in the country. Get off the driveway entrance and the car gets stuck in the drainage ditches. I remove them for summer because they get in the way for lawn mowing.
I'm in So. Calif coastal. We have (or had, until global warming*) no real "winter". Daylight get shorter, thanks in part to *&^%^%$$ Daylight Savings ( which everybody hates and nobody seems to make Congress get rid of it). Temps at the beach rarely get below 40's at night. Winter sunsets over the ocean are magically beautiful. I can grow food all years; just vary the cops by season.
That said, I really would like some snow, but I have to travel to the Far North and Far South to enjoy the white stuff.
*Normal, stable weather patterns are so ****ed up the last year or two! We had 96 degrees last week, and now it's down to 609-70s.
Any climate change skeptics still left out there -- and this is a smart enough group that I doubt if you are fooled by govt and corporate spin -- should read "CENSORING SCIENCE" by Mark Bowen. Even for moi, who doesn't believe much of Washington/corporate spin, this was a shocker. Centering around the career of JIM HANSEN, one of the greatest scientists of this era, "Censoring Science" uses original sources to document how the Bush Admin, and before him, going back to Reagan, partially skipping Clinton, ACTIVELY censored/suppressed reports produced by honest scientists they tried, and often succeeded, in intimidating at NASA, NOAA, and other agencies concerned with Earth Science.
Over 30 years ago, Jim Hansen sounded the alarm about anthropogenic causes of global warming. Now, we may be at the "tipping point"; phrase he coined to denote the point at which the damage cannot be reversed. Even if it could have been halted, it would have taken centuries to restore Earth's balance/
One wonders how these corporate/government criminals manage to ignore that their children and grandchildren will be living in the degraded world they helped create...
How do you vary the cops? Here the cops are always the same. If they aren't shooting unarmed black men, they are busting the heads of war protesters. In Denver, they even brag about getting up early to beat the crowds. Although, that may be better than turning "Xe Services LLC" (Blackwater) loose, like they did in New Orleans.
Poor dear, enjoy the white stuff do you, and it's soooooo far away. Until a way is found to send others excess to you, you may want to stick out a thumb and . . .
Head southeast on Lincoln Blvd toward Broadway St
0.5 mi
Turn left at the 1st cross street onto Olympic Blvd (signs for Santa Monica Fwy/Los Angeles)
463 ft
Merge onto I-10 E via the ramp to Los Angeles
15.6 mi
Take exit 16B on the left for CA-60 E/Pomona/I-5 S toward Santa Ana
0.3 mi
Merge onto CA-60 E
51.4 mi
Take exit 52B for Main St
0.1 mi
Turn right at Main St
0.7 mi
Turn left at 3rd St
1.7 mi
Turn right to merge onto I-215 S
18.6 mi
Take exit 15 for CA-74 E toward Hemet
0.3 mi
Slight right at CA-74 E
31.6 mi
Slight left at CA-243 N
3.9 mi
Slight right at S Circle Dr
194 ft
Idyllwild, CA
125 miles,
2 hours 22 minutes.
or if that is too far, you can get to Arrowhead Lake in 1 and 3/4 hr., but I'll let you Google that one.
Nice thing about Idyllwild is that it is just above Palm Springs, and you can make the run back by Hadley's Dried Fruit Stand.
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney,
meme pour toit?
You seem to be looking in the rearview mirror.
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
Ch. 4 LIGHTLY, CAREFULLY, GRACEFULLY p.154
Every climate model we've got shows that "by the end of the century an average July day will almost certainly be hotter than the hottest heat waves we experi- ence now," according to a team of American researchers. And those hottest heat waves decimate our fields, in Italy and France, for example, the 2003 heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people also cut corn yields by a third. "It simply becomes too hot for growing plants," says Rosamond Naylor, the director of the Program for Food Security and the Environment at Stan- ford. "The heat damages the crop's ability to produce enough yield."11 A 2009 study found that a million square kilometers of Africa might soon be too hot to grow crops. (That's an area larger than the United States plants in its eight largest field crops combined.) "Maize will basically no longer be possible" to culti- vate across wide swaths, the study found; there will simply be too many hot days. . .
2100 the average temperature in the growing season will be hot- ter than "any temperatures recorded there to date." Past a cer- tain point, corn won't fertilize, rice won't grow.13 And people can't work, at least not as hard. A new study from the Australian researcher Tord Kjellstrom found that by 2030 Indian laborers would be 30 percent less productive, simply because of increased heat. As one Bengali farmer put it, "Working under the open sky during summer has become nearly impossible?for farmers and their cattle alike."14 . . .
Droughts have returned to the United States, too, even though people have stopped wasting so much water in their homes. The federal government says that thirty-six states face water shortages in the next five years,18 which is bad news for farming, since 70 percent of the water we use goes for irrigation, and irrigated fields supply as much as 40 percent of the world's food. By 2007 half of Australia's farmland was in a declared drought, and a farmer was committing suicide every four days.19 In California, in the
156 ? EAARTH
spring of 2009, groups of farmworkers, many wearing surgical masks against the blowing dust, marched for four days to demand the federal government somehow supply them with more water?the year's drought had already cost the state 23,700 jobs and $477 million in revenue.20 Farmers are already letting orchard trees die for lack of water to keep them alive; in the Cen- tral Valley unemployment grew 9.4 percent in a year through July 2009. "There's no water, so there's not much work," Kiki Torres told a reporter.21
As we melt those glaciers and snowfields in the continental interiors, things will only get worse. In the first major speech he gave after being named secretary of energy, the Nobel laureate Steven Chu told an audience in his native California: "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could hap- pen." If we don't dramatically slow global warming, he said, the rapid melt of the Sierra snowpack means "we're looking at a sce- nario where there's no more agriculture in California," adding, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going," either.
Bud, you are getting reddish blossoms on your hydrangeas because the soil IS more alkaline. Acidic soil is what is required to produce blue hydrangea flowers. The UCG's are not going to have much of an impact on existing soil pH - they are only just slightly acidic (most of the acid is extracted with the liquid coffee from the grounds during brewing) and it would take a huge amount of them to effect any significant change. Generally, when an acidic based material is used as a mulch - like the coffee grounds or pine straw - there is no change to soil pH except a slight lowering at the soil surface.
I was wondering about that myself. Unless he wanted red blossoms. For blue hydrangeas blue spray paint works well also :) Ok, I do not that, but I do know a local gardener that does paint the blossoms. Looks cool from a distance.
Many years ago my wife came home with a wonderful blue and white striped carnation that she had bought at the railway station on the way home. In the day when carnations were $2 a dozen she had paid $1 for one stem. It was may sad duty to tell her it was a white carnation that had been stood in blue ink for a while and it had sucked some up through its water transport system. But it was very pretty.
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