Fast Urban Composting and Coffee Grounds in the Garden
The Brilliant Homestead
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When in search of brilliant ideas today, we came across the following post by Jeremy Marin:
This summer I kept more than 1,000 lbs. of “garbage” from getting hauled dozens of miles away in a 3 mpg vehicle to an incinerator. I also saved money and got great compost.
Spurred by a question from JP Greenhouse , I decided to see how quickly I could make ‘urban compost’ with nothing but coffee grinds and newspaper.
For about eight weeks:
80-120 lbs. of coffee grinds/week, and
almost every newspaper we got went into a town-discounted ‘New Age Composter’ compost unit. The compost turned out great, with near-perfect pH (6.9), nitrogen within norms, and very high potassium. If you don’t care about the details, you can skip to the test results below.
More details :
Coffee grinds are easy and plentiful. The local Starbucks , instead of giving me the little bags of used coffee grinds, would give me a trash bag-full at a time. In return I’d bring them various items from the garden.
Each bag was 20-30 lbs. and I retrieved several per week, sometimes two per day.
Some of you, like I did initially, might be saying “Your compost will be too acidic!” Turns out, as studies have shown, the acid gets washed off during the brewing process, so your coffee may be acidic but the grinds aren’t.
Shredded newspaper. Image courtesy of David Bleasdale, some rights reserved.
Compost needs both nitrogen (which the coffee grinds supply) and carbon. Carbon typically comes from adding leaves but I didn’t have any in the middle of the summer.
Our house is, however, one of the last faithful subscribers to several newspapers, which, as a tree product, is high in carbon. (Just make sure you’re using newsprint, not the inserts or magazines. Also, a friend who is an editor of a “wicked local” paper says they don’t always use soy inks, so check your source.) We used mostly the New York Times, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal.
I used a shredder to rip the newspaper into small pieces so they would compost faster. (One of my original concerns was the time it would take for that much coffee grinds to decompose – smaller items decompose faster.) There were some days I’d spend an hour shredding newspaper with my son in a shredder that would only do a few pages at a time.
In addition, food scraps from feeding a vegetarian family of three went into the compost, but that didn’t amount to much volume compared to the other items.
All of this went into a “New Age Composter” BIN-24 compost unit I got for $40 from my town (Arlington, MA) DPW. It is subsidized through the MA DEP. I like the unit, which can be set to a number of sizes – I had it at its largest – almost a full cubic yard.
For most of the approximately eight weeks, the compost had been cooking very well, hovering between 120-140 degrees Fahrenheit. I turned it at least two-three times each week to allow air in. Several times I had to add water because the pile was so hot it became dry.
CLICK HERE to read the rest and see the test results on this interesting compost experiment.
At The Brilliant Homestead we’re a big fan of reusing coffee grounds in the garden. In fact, we often directly add them around roses, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries as fertilizer. Combined with a bit of Epsom salts, coffee grounds really bring out the blooms and fruits. In a compost pile, coffee grounds are a very good “green.” Coffee grounds are also good feed for vermicomposting systems. Due to their small size, coffee grounds turn into compost rapidly and will feed your garden well.
We get ours from a local coffee shop once a week in a five-gallon bucket. Score some of your own and start feeding your garden the good stuff!
P.S. If you’re interested in getting all the compost you can, we highly recommend picking up a copy of David The Good’s book Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting .
( Photo credit on title image: Josh Lodder, creative commons license.)
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