As beautifully rewarding as gardening sounds, an enchanting green empire demands loads of love and care, as well as a bunch of tips and cautions for a promising prosperous reward. One of these critical tips is composting; it ensures that plants get sufficient nutrients from the soil and that the soil pH level is suitable for the plant. Looking for a list of plants that like coffee grounds?
Have no fear! In this article, we’ve made a list of plants that like coffee grounds – whether they’re fresh or compost.
Plants That Like Fresh Unbrewed Coffee Grounds
Let’s begin with the fresh unbrewed pure coffee grounds. It goes well for acid-loving plants, which won’t be dried or damaged by strong coffee, but rather flourished.
Sweet Potatoes
Ranked as the seventh highly-produced crop globally and the third most essential root crop, sweet potatoes are on top of the acid-loving list. They’re rich in vitamins A, C, and E. On top of that, they’re great providers of potassium, iron, and beta-carotene.
Fortunately, you can’t only plant them in your garden, but you can also grow them indoors. The sweet veggies accept coffee grounds, and they show quick results with it.
Tomatoes
Author Note: Tomatoes are known for being the most acidic fruit, although it was dreaded throughout some historical stages. Due to its early relationship with the deadly nightshade plant, people used to think tomatoes were poisonous.
This relation was the reason for the tomato’s scientific naming too. “Lycopersicon Lycopersicum” means wolf peach. Over the years, the evolution in tomato crops has shown up to 100 times increase in tomato sizes since it was first cultivated.
If you have a tomato plant in your backyard, you can use coffee grounds all you want. The acidic fruit loves it.
Broccoli
Known as the “Crown of Jewel Nutrition,” broccoli goes back to an Italian origin. Its name is derived from “Broccolo,” which translates to the flowering top of a cabbage. It gained this name because of its cabbage resemblance and since both of them come from the same plant family.
Broccoli is high in vitamins A, C, K, B1, and B6. It assists both the immunity and digestive systems, and it helps prevent high blood pressure, birth defects, and cancer.
Broccoli can be grown all year long, but it thrives best in moderate or slightly chilly weather, which corresponds to spring or autumn.
Holly
Referred to as one of the tree-celebs, Holly is famous for its many historical and cultural legends and beliefs. The Europeans once believed that cutting down a holly tree would bring man misfortune or some kind of curse in the second millennium B.C.E.
The Romans cherished it, too, and related it to Saturn—the god of agriculture. If you want to grow the enchanted plant, giving it some coffee grounds for flourishing would be a good idea.
Gardenia
Widely praised for their strong scent, gardenias are rare flowering plants that can withstand low temperatures. Some of its types can even survive at -18 degrees Celsius. However, gardenias need a humid medium, and they flourish when you add fresh coffee grounds to their soil.
You can either plant them indoors or outdoors, but it’s recommended to plant them anywhere you can enjoy their pretty aroma.
No wonder that gardenia was Coco Chanel’s favorite flower choice!
Gooseberries
Gooseberry trees grow to an average height of 5 feet. They require moisture, coolness, and humidity. However, they only need a bit of sunlight.
Gooseberries are an excellent source of vitamin C and E, as well as potassium, calcium, magnesium, and zinc. They are well-known for being the antidote to many health issues, such as strokes, heart diseases, UV ray damages, gum diseases, excess salts, and type 2 diabetes.
You can add the coffee grounds with the dead clippings around the gooseberries. They’ll neutralize the acidity and get the plant to glow.
Snake plants
Snake plants thrive better by less watering, and they tolerate different levels of humidity and weather changes. They even don’t mind shade or medium lighting. In addition to that, their pots’ upsizing is slower than that of the average plants.
Author Note: A mix of cactus soil and coffee grounds is recommended for snake plants since there are a lot of pores in cactus soil, which gives the roots less time to hold water. Adding coffee grounds helps overcome this fast drainage of water.
Daffodils
Daffodil, otherwise known as Narcissus, has a huge number of varieties. Each one has its own unique hybridized traits. Having more than 13,000 types, daffodils are the flowering plants with the largest number of hybrids.
A daffodil’s leafless stem is as high as 6 to 20 inches. Its flourish time starts at the beginning of March or October. In some cases, the plant may have leaves only without flowers, a phenomenon called daffodil blindness. It occurs when the roots are overcrowded.
Coffee grounds can significantly affect the growth of daffodils; they’ll improve drainage and water retention.
Plants That Like Coffee Compost
Coffee compost is made from green materials and brown materials. The green materials, rich in nitrogen, refer to the coffee grounds. They take about 15% to 20% of the total compost volume.
These materials are mostly plant-based animal manures, fruit peels, or fresh grass.
Meanwhile, the brown materials, high in carbon, refer to newspapers, straws, or old dried leaves. This carbonic addition lowers the high acidic pitch and makes the compost suitable for many plants that don’t accept high acidity levels.
Arum Lilies
Arum lilies, or calla, are white, yellow, orange, pink, purple, lavender, light blue, or green. Their pretty colors add to any garden, but they’re fatally toxic. That’s the reason the flowers aren’t a common house plant. If you do have some arum lilies, you can use coffee compost for fast growth.
Elephant Ear
The Alocasia plant is commonly known as the elephant ear plant due to its heart-shaped leaves. It grows to a height range of 2 to 8 feet, and its leaves reach an average width of 3 feet.
This plant’s ideal conditions are low to moderate lighting, slightly acidic soil, hot temperatures, and high moisture. However, if you water it beyond a specific limit, it may die. The coffee compost will improve the water drainage, thereby protecting the plant from over sweating.
Marigolds
Marigolds are super useful. You can plant them in your vegetable or fruit garden to keep pests away from your crops. They’re also used in medicine fabrications since they’re a good source of lutein.
Marigolds tend to attract slugs; coffee compost will keep those away. Additionally, it’ll boost its growth.
Plants You Shouldn’t Use Coffee Grounds For
Some plants are commonly known for being moisture dependent. Thus, their growth can be hindered or even totally interrupted by an acidic surrounding. Also, coffee grounds increase the soil’s water-retaining, which may serve some plants and harm others. Here’s a list of some plants that don’t do with coffee grounds:
- Some flowering plants such as orchids, lavender, and black-eyed susan.
- Some vegetables like asparagus.
- Few types of herbs, such as ferns.
- Other plants such as devil’s ivy or pothos, cactus, century plants, ferns, and rosemary.
Tips for Adding Coffee Grounds to Your Plants
The fact that some plants go well with coffee grounds doesn’t mean you should add them mindlessly. You’ll want to follow some tips if you want to ensure you gain the desired results.
Author Note: For coffee composts, you should perfectly adjust the mix ratio to avoid over-acidity. Add coffee grounds to the soil with a recommended ratio of 1:3 or 1:2. Otherwise, you can just use an online compost calculator.
Overuse can result in suppression of the plants’ roots, a dramatic decrease in soil bacteria—some of which are quite beneficial—or trapping the soil worms. So, suiting the compost ratios and amount is pretty important.
When applying, scrub the compost into the soil or at least let it cover the topsoil with a layer of a minimum thickness of 1.5 inches. Also, take care to evenly distribute the compost to avoid aeration blockage in certain areas.
To use the coffee grounds as mulch, you can go through the same procedure but with a few tweaks. After covering the soil, all you have to do is to use wood chips, so they act as organic mulch layers. This will accelerate the soil’s germination. Such a process is often used while planting soya beans, cabbage, and sugar beet seeds.
In Conclusion
In most cases, coffee grounds are super useful to both the soil and the plant. Besides, who wants to support a planet full of waste when recycling is a valid option?
According to National Geographic, with each ton of food made into compost instead of being thrown away, a large amount of carbon and methane is being balanced, which corresponds to a healthier environment and a happier eco-system.
We recommend against throwing away coffee grounds or flushing it—a matter which may cause you a later drainage problem. Start seizing every bit of used coffee for a better tomorrow and a greener future!
Stay caffeinated friends!