Turn your morning coffee into your garden's best friend

If there’s one thing Australians love, it's a warm, rich cup of coffee. It's the lifeblood which fuels the nation, encourages catch ups and helps us unwind. It is also a powerful source of superfood for your garden.

Your leftover coffee grounds really do pack a punch with a range of nutrients ready to be released back into the soil, including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. That’s not to mention other micronutrients including magnesium, calcium, iron, boron, copper, and zinc. A real smorgasbord of important elements all in one place! The kind of diversity every healthy garden needs to flourish.

The key is unlocking these goodies so they are available to plants, using microbes to break down the grounds and release their bounty back into the soil. This will extract the nutrients and keep them within your garden’s ecosystem instead of contributing to landfill. Organic matter like coffee waste in landfill emits methane gas, one of the main greenhouse gases and a real challenge globally.

Leftover coffee grounds can be spread as a mulch around plants as they are. Keep the mulch under 1cm thick, as spent grounds can stick together in thicker layers to impede the flow of air and water - two critical components to a healthy garden ecosystem. So spread them out as best you can.

This form of mulching is a decent, but limited option for recycling. You can’t use too much of the coffee grounds in one place, and they are slow to return their riches to the earth.

Nutrients can be unlocked better with compost microbes in a controlled setting. By maintaining an optimal temperature for the microbes to do their work and protecting them from the elements, they can quickly break down spent grounds to create a nutrient-dense and nourishing product which will supercharge your garden.

So turn your morning ritual into a real celebration of your garden by converting coffee grounds into compost soil and make the most of those powerful nutrients which will help your plants thrive.

On top of that, coffee roasters' wastes are compostable!