Hello DGC, First off thank you for all the useful Cannabis knowledge. Quick question about coffee grounds for top dress and/or compost tea. Want to reuse all the coffee grounds the wife and I drink. Question is can you use flavored coffee grounds or would the flavor mess with terps or the flavor of the bud. Thank you from the Green Mtn State.
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Using coffee grounds isn’t recommended, this explains it and the reasons why
https://curiosity.com/topics/whatever-you-do-dont-put-coffee-grounds-in-your-garden-curiosity/
Prime
Thanks for sharing Prime. Killer caffeine. I tried like half a sandwich bag around the edge of my 20 gal (trying to create crawling bug barrier / de around the tote on the floor seems to be better idea) and i lost a handful of worms.
Respectfully disagree about coffee grounds being harmful for plants. In my experience, as long as you don’t go too overboard, coffee grounds make an excellent addition to compost. That article makes some big claims but doesn’t really offer any solid science to back it up, so I’m pretty skeptical of their conclusions.
For every article you find saying coffee is bad for your garden, you’ll find like 25 articles saying it’s good.
(https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/ingredients/coffee-grounds-gardening.htm)
I worked in the coffee industry for many years and used grounds in my veggie garden for most of that time. We had a policy where customers could bring in 5 gal buckets and we’d fill them up with grounds for them to take home. It was super popular and TONS of customers were coming in to get grounds for their garden. If it was harming plants, I’d really doubt that would be the case.
pH isn’t really an issue as long as you aren’t using tons and tons of grounds in your soil all at once. (Too much of anything is a bad thing!)
The pH of liquid coffee is around 5, and grounds are usually higher than that, so it’s not actually that acidic. Unless your soil is like half coffee, you shouldn’t have an issue. Once they are composted the pH seems to balance out anyway.
Caffeine is a potent and terrifying drug, (yes it’s a drug and it kills several people every year) but I’ve seen no evidence it survives the composting process, or that it’s actually harmful to plants in reasonable amounts.
My personal observation is that coffee grounds are a good source of plant available nitrogen, and adding grounds to soil often seemed to increase worm populations. So I would say…
Don’t use too much, and compost them first, but coffee grounds are fine to use in the garden.
I appreciate the info and knowledge!!
And honestly a don’t drink alot, possibly only a sandwich baggie of grounds per month. Now for the flavor does it change the terp profile
Strong synthetic or concentrated flavours like banana or mint or vanilla may permeate into your garden, but aren’t used as building blocks for the terpenes they produce. So they may make the garden smell like the flavours, the terps in the product won’t. But I’d definitely be using coffee grounds as a compost input and NOT as a mulch as the excess caffeine will leach out and it isn’t good for your plants. Year 9 (9th grade) science experiment taught me this with bean shoots. Hope this helps
Peace bro