Compost and earthworms

Stirred up the compost. This is probably 1/3 chicken droppings + straw bedding, with generous amounts of poodle wool, yard trimmings, kitchen scraps, and coffee grounds.

This compost will need a couple more months before it is ready. Right now it's not 'done' enough.

No worms were added - these find their way up from the soil.

When I remember, I've been bringing home coffee grounds from work. I weighed them, it's about 1 pound 7 ounces daiy. Over a month, that's a lot of garden supplement.

Poodles Love Spring Weather

Other weekend garden tasks -

The 'winter sow' letttuce didn't come up. So I replanted the container with cilantro.

The Chinese Apricot was planted (from Lowes, "Prunus armeniaca "Chinese").

Picked up a back of used coffee grounds from Starbucks.

That's about all.

Interesting web site on gardening by nature's signs: phenology. This will be a topic to develop.

Inchelium Garlic. Coffee grounds. Blog Maintenance.

The Inchelium garlic is at about the same stage as garlic plants last year. This variety is a Northwest native american heirloom. I had also planted German Red, which did very well last year. Most of the garlic that we have eaten for past few months has been from the garden, and we eat several heads of garlic per week.

Last night, I stopped by Starbucks & picked up 2 bags of coffee grounds for the tomato bed. The barrista asked if I wanted the garbage bag full too, so I got even more than hoped for. Somehow I feel embarrased to ask for them, but if not used, they would add to landfill waste, with a rich, organic soil enhancing material that is then lost to the environment, meanwhile soil amendments need to be bought to enhance the soil. I'm less and less enthusiastic about the packaged manures, since those animals are fed antibiotics, worsening the antibiotic-resistant bacteria situation. Coffee grounds are a great plant food. I usually scatter the coffee grounds across the surface of the soil, and dig them in. Some also go into the compost. The earthworms love them. Despite what a number of sites claim, they are not acidic - the acid goes onto the coffee, which we drink - the grounds are neutral. I figure that I've added a few hundred poiunds of coffee grounds to the "growing greener" yard over the past few years.

Labels are now added to the postings. it's fun to click on them & have all of the postings on a subject pop up on one web page. But, for some reason, the process of posting photos is more cumbersome since I updated to the new blogger. Win some, lose some.

Small things add up: Coffee grounds for the garden.

For the past 3 years, I've been collecting coffee grounds from work, home, and occasionally from Starbucks. Sometimes I add them directly to the soil (as in Winter or Spring when I'm digging around in the garden), sometimes to the worm bin, and sometimes to the compost pile.

Some simple calculations:
I buy a 5 pound bag of coffee beans about once monthly (for my use only). 5 pounds X 12 months = 60 pounds (dry weight) per year.

At work, I collect the grounds from my small section of the office, also for the compost pile or garden. That's about 1/2 pound daily (wet) for 4 days per week, or 2 pounds per day. So, about 100 pounds per year.

COffee grounds make for good compost or soil amendment. They are similar in soil nutritional value to manures, but without the salt and antibiotics that go into animal agriculture.

There are about 298 million people in the United States. Per capita coffee consumption is 4.4 kg (9.68 pounds) per year. 298 million X 9.68 pounds / 2000#/ton = 1.4 million tons per year.

So, from that little cup of coffee per person, a couple of cups daily, it starts to add up.

I'm sure that there are better calculations, from more accurate data out there, but the bottom line is, it's still "a lot". Collecting coffee grounds for the garden is good for the soil, and good for the environment.