You may love your morning coffee but did you know that your lawn will love it too? After you finish your cup of coffee, those grounds can be a godsend for your garden.
According to Martha Stewart, coffee grounds provide essential nutrients for your lawn and can help to enrich it. Rob Palmer, lawn expert, landscaper, and brand president at Lawn Squad told the website that coffee grounds contain nitrogen, a key nutrient grasses and other plants need to thrive. When it is composted or worked into soil, nitrogen improves soil structure and helps with photosynthesis.
If you don’t want your coffee grounds to go to waste and fancy trying to improve the health of your lawn in one fell swoop, it’s easy enough to do.
Once you have finished brewing your coffee, save your grounds and let them dry out completely.
After they have dried, lightly sprinkle them over the grass, taking care to ensure they don’t clump and form a crust which will stop the grass from absorbing water and light.
You can also add the coffee grounds to your compost and mix them through. Once the compost is ready, mix it into your soil as a natural fertiliser.
It’s not just grass that can benefit from coffee grounds either. According to Lucie Bradley, a gardening and greenhouse expert at Easy Garden Irrigation, azaleas, camellias, hollies and hydrangeas all love coffee grounds because of their light acidity, which helps to maintain the pH levels in soil.
Edible plants can benefit too. Things like blackberries, blueberries, carrots, cucumbers and leafy greens such as lettuce and kale all love coffee grounds – just don;’t use it exclusively as they don’t contain all the nutrients these plants need.
There are also some plants that will not benefit from coffee grounds. If a plant prefers alkaline soil, the acidity in coffee will throw off its pH levels. These include lavender, leeks, rosemary, thyme and sunflowers.
