Used Coffee Grounds (UCGs)

 Used Coffee Grounds

My daughter works at The Coffee Club here at the new Northpoint Shopping Center they built just for us and, being just around the corner, I asked her what they did with their Used Coffee Grounds (UCGs) and she said they just threw them away. Naturally the next question was, may I have them? And the answer was, yes.

Now I'm getting about five to six, 10 litre buckets of used grounds a week. All good.

But at first I wasn't sure if this was a good idea or not so I jumped on to Google (UCGs in the garden) and was quickly reassured that this was a good thing. A real good thing.

Coffee everywhere

There is several ways to use UCGs including adding it to your compost or once you have compost you can add UCGs at a ratio of one to three before applying to your garden beds. Snails and slugs aren't supposed to like it. I've added it directly to my plants with good results and used it as a week liquid fertiliser. So far so good. You can also scatter it over your lawn as a slow release fertiliser.

Experimenting

I'll keep experimenting with it and see what results I get but in the meantime if anyone else has any experience with UCGs I love to hear from you.


Two weeks ago I added two to three hand fulls around each of my silverbeet and I'll swear theyhave  doubled in size.

The only part I'm unsure about is using UCGs on plants that like a non acid soil. Plants like beans, peas and cucurbits. From what I can tell UCGs are acidic and notagood idea to add diredctly to the soil around these plants.

In The Garden

In the flowering garden then acid loving plants like azaleas, camellias and hydrangeas would love some UCGs as well as plants like blueberries and strawberries would benefit as well.

It's stopped raining now, just a short shower really, so I'm heading back out to the veggie patch to spread more coffee.

Cheers

Stewart.

P.S. My Plants do look very alert and attentive, :)