How to Dispose of Coffee Grounds? | BlindMan Coffee
Free plant food...free face & hand scrub...free (and kind) slug and snail deterrent...in short, used coffee grounds save you money as they have all kinds of great uses in ways that are actually easier (and cheaper!) than throwing them down your sink plughole...
On Your Garden, Pot Plants and Compost Heap
If you're a gardener you know how expensive plant fertilizers from the garden centre can be. When you drink coffee regularly, you have a free and continuous supply of granular, nitrogen rich organic matter your plants will love.
This (above) is a photo, taken in May, of the border below our front window - where most of our coffee grounds go. Lush, healthy, vigorous growth without any proprietary plant foods - just coffee grounds! And remember also that strong healthy plants like these are much more resilient against insect attack - so you'll probably need less insecticide too.
Although fresh (unbrewed) coffee is quite acidic for use as a general plant feed, used coffee has a more-or-less neutral ph value and is rich in nitrogen which means it's great for your garden plants, pot plants and compost heap.
Plants love nitrogen.
So if you brew espresso or Aeropress, crumble the leftover pucks onto your borders, around your pot plants or straight into your compost bin.
Cafetière? Remove the plunger and stir up the grounds with some tap water. Swill the whole lot onto your soil.
If you use a filter method, the paper with the grounds inside can simply go straight into your compost bin where they'll provide excellent organic matter and help to aerate things in there - allowing that all important oxygen to circulate, the bugs to thrive and turn all your clippings and peelings into gorgeous rich compost.
Face and Hand Scrub
We think you might need to really REALLY love coffee for this one, but coffee grounds can be used as a free and, apparently, effective exfoliating facial and hand scrub! If you don't believe us, Google 'Coffee face scrub' and you'll see proprietary coffee scrubs in nice packaging for £14.99 and up. We think coffee scrubs work by the coffee grounds exfoliating the surface dead skin cells so paying extra for 'Arabica' (as a skin exfoliator) probably isn't necessary! Besides, you're probably already buying high quality Arabica anyway - right?!
You can mix the ground with coconut oil and exfoliate and revitalise your skin.
We've never tried this but can imagine the graininess having a similar action to those expensive face scrubs on the poshes of shelves! And it might be fun!
Slug and Snail Deterrent
When you don't want to kill these slimy creatures (or the animals that eat them such as hedgehogs and birds) with nasty poisonous slug pellets, use coffee grounds - which don't harm these voracious creatures - it just encourages them to go foraging elsewhere.
Slugs and snails rely on being able to slide over smooth surfaces and dislike the graininess of dry coffee grounds. The small amount of residual caffeine in the grounds puts them off even further.