Uses For Coffee Grounds
As I work in a coffee company surrounded by coffee all day, it stands to reason that I drink a lot of coffee. At home, I drink espresso and so I often have coffee grounds going in the bin. Not any more though.
Are there many uses for coffee grounds? Most people already know they’re good for plants, while some of these other uses might surprise you! We’ve compiled some great information from trusted sites and sources so you can get the most out of them. The first few are gardening-related as you would expect, and then there’s some more unusual ones….
A1 Coffee’s Top 10 Uses For Your Coffee Grounds
1. Add coffee grounds to your compost. Coffee grounds can accelerate the decomposing process in compost. Just add a teaspoon of lime for every 3 kilos of coffee grounds and keep the size of your compost heap quite small.
2. Add coffee grounds to plants that need a pH of 3.0 to 5.0. Adding coffee grounds to blueberries, cranberries and most citrus fruits, works wonders. Other plants that love coffee are camellias, gardenias and rhododendrons.
3. Use coffee grounds to make a liquid plant feed. Add a handful of coffee grounds to a bucket of fresh water and leave for a couple of days until you have a lovely amber-colored liquid feed. Apply to your plants as required.
4. Use coffee grounds to deter garden pests. Snails and slugs hate coffee grounds sprinkled around plants, making it perfect for deterring them while feeding your soil at the same time.
5. Make a body scrub. Simply add some coffee grounds to coconut oil and a little brown sugar and you have a cheap and effective body scrub for use in the bath or shower.
6. Get rid of smells. Scrubbing your hands with coffee grounds is a really effective way of removing the smell of onions and garlic from your hands after preparing food.
7. Fireplaces. If you’re lucky enough to have an open fire, sprinkling wet coffee grounds over your ashes before sweeping them up ensures you don’t end up with ash on your carpet or going into the air.
8. Keep your fridge fresh. Strange as it may sound, coffee grounds act the same as baking soda in the refrigerator. Put a cup of old grounds in the back of your fridge to keep it fresh.
9. Fishing bait. If you are a keen angler, you may already have heard of this one. Keeping your worms in coffee grounds keeps them fresh for longer.
10. Dog flea repellent. Adding coffee grounds to the bath water when you’re bathing your dog is said to help repel fleas.
We’ve collated this list from a number of different sources, and as you’ll appreciate, we haven’t been able to verify all of them. Bathing a dog in the office isn’t the most practical thing in the world! So please don’t rub coffee grounds in your eyes based on anything we’ve said. I did that once by accident and it wasn’t much fun……
Read more coffee stories at https://www.a1coffee.net/index.php/blog
A1 Coffee - May 2014