How to Save Coffee and Tea Grounds and other kitchen waste for plant food

Coffee and tea grounds are great plant food, quickly eaten by worms in the garden.  They are available year-round. They are particularly useful for keeping blueberry plants happy by keeping their worms continually fed.  Scattered on living soil with a lot of worms, they disappear quickly; they do not keep the ground covered.  Other mulch or ground cover is needed to keep blueberry roots happily covered as well.

Saving and using them can be a problem; they are very wet, and readily mold.  Therefore, the key to using them is to dry them and not enclose them.

Making my beverages; I use a hand-drip; the bowl on top has a hole in it.

 Coffee and tea grounds in the first drying stage, in their filter baskets.  Note the tea basket is on top of previous batches with a paper towel between to wick the moisture away.

While making the next pot, the previous filter and grounds go in the bowl on top of the paper towel to continue drying.  Normally, I would do this on top of the paper towel and grounds, as in the previous photo.  A separate bowl is a good in-between step for multiple batches in the same day.

 Grounds ready to spread in the garden.

First, after making your beverage, place the coffee filter in a cereal bowl on a paper towel to begin drying until you need to make the next batch.  It will dry faster with the grounds facing up.  When you make the next batch, dump the first grounds in a second bowl, and put a paper towel on top.  Put the next batch in the first drying bowl to dry.  Do not put either bowl in an enclosed space like a cabinet.

As you make more batches of coffee or tea, keep moving the older grounds from the first drying bowl on top of the paper towel into the storage bowl under the paper towel.  When it is full, scatter it in the garden.  You should not try to keep them for more than three or four days or they will tend to mold and lump together.

Another readily plant food that you can use in pots and on your blueberries is egg and milk.  Both have sticky proteins that grab hold of the soil to feed it and your plants.  If you make custard or French toast, for instance, you can rinse the bowl and measuring cups into another bowl and water your potted plants or blueberries with them.

The best mulch, bar none, for preventing weeds germination is leaves.  Every other mulch will eventually become a seed bed for weeds; many start right out growing whatever lands on the surface.  Leaves dry out quickly in the top few layers where the seeds land, so they can’t germinate.  Large seeds can grow through them, but smaller seeds are either smothered beneath them or dry out on top.  The next year’s supply comes along before the previous year’s leaves become a seed bed.  A couple inches guards against most weeds; a foot deep will grow huge veges.  Just plant large seeds or small starts into the damp leaves beneath the top layers.

A bowl of kitchen waste.  Note that the bowl is small; it doesn't pay to let them pile up and rot.

           If you use leaf mulch in the garden to keep weeds down, you can scatter kitchen waste in the leaves.  Bananas are particularly useful for their potassium, important for root growth.  They turn brown and disappear into the general mulch quickly.  Fruit seeds will grow, a bonus.  Be sure to remove labels; they stay bright.  Don’t scatter onion or citrus peels in the garden; they take a long time to blend in and rot, and they stink when they do.  They belong in the trash.

How to Kill Goat Head

          It’s been a warm spring.  Goat head, AKA puncture vine, bull thorn, tack vine, and other descriptive names, is already growing all over the lot and starting to bloom and crawl over the curb on the huge vacant lot on M Street, at Milbank.  That means that they are also sprouting in front of the vacant warehouse two doors down at 1080 M, on the vacant lot on the NW corner of M and Parkway.   Within a month, they will be puncturing passing bike tires.  It is a weed of public, commercial and vacant lots; people usually don’t tolerate it around their residences once they become acquainted with the seeds.

Lot full of goathead, Milbank and M Streets

             Goat heads make a 5-sided seed head that falls apart when ripe into five hard, tack-shaped seeds that stick in shoes, dogs’ feet, and tires.  They have leaves divided into 5-11 leaflets and five-petaled symmetrical yellow flowers about ¼ inch wide.  They usually lie flat to the ground, but can pile up to several inches, and can spread out a yard wide.  

Ripening goat heads.  Credit: Forrest and Kim Starr

 

The seeds apparently are broken up by high-speed driving, so car and truck tires do not usually spread them and are apparently too thick be punctured by them.  But they are a good reason to have flat-free tires on wheelbarrows, bikes and trailers. 

 Goat head seeds.  Credit: Steve Hurst @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

In the mid-80’s we were able to ride bikes all over town and country without being troubled by goat heads, which I had to go to Arizona to become acquainted with.  By the time I came back in 1999, they were already here, and I pulled them on sight.  Within 5 years, there were so many that I stopped pulling them on properties I do not control.  A few years ago, I started pulling them on public property where I can, and agitating to enforce our nuisance codes against this noxious weed.

            Goat head flower.  Credit: Forrest and Kim Starr

  

            They apparently do not spread far or fast, except on bike tires and riding mowers.  People pull them out of their shoes and dogs’ feet ASAP.  At the Wastewater Treatment plant, they apparently came out of the lawn and were brought there by riding mowers from other properties.  Since they have not been weeded out, they are being spread to other properties on riding mowers by the City’s contractor.  The same has been happening for years at Schroeder Park near their dog park.

            They have a deep, strong taproot that can be pulled when the ground is damp by gathering the foliage and pulling the crown where the vines meet, in places like watered lawns, where they thrive. 

They also thrive in dry soil, where they are nearly impossible to pull.  But they can easily be cut off their roots below the crown with pruning scissors, and they do not grow back.

            I did just that for two months last year, around the Wastewater Treatment Plant, in anticipation of the City building a dog park on that property, which they have done.  But I expect to be killing them there for the next five years or more; their seeds don’t all sprout at once, and they last a long time.

5/18/2013. Published on Yahoo Voices

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener        541-955-9040      rycke@gardener.com

How to kill goat head and star thistle

Riding mowers spread goat heads

Trouble on the Ground: Puncture Vine

Kill Heron’s Bill and Cheat Grass

          Heron’s Bill has been blooming for months, and is ripening its seed, poking its heron bills at the sky.  It has ¼-3/8 inch pink-purple flowers, filigree leaves, and seed pods up to 3 inches long. 

Heron's bill on city property.  Two years ago, this was one plant, next to the sign, then a few; and now...

  

It can grow up to 18 inches high and twice as wide, creating a fire hazard as it dries out.  But its seeds are its worst problem.  As they dry out, they pop off the plant, twisting up into a corkscrew shape except for the sticker seed at one end, and a straight tail at the other.  When it gets wet, it unwinds, and the tail holds it still while the seed screws itself into the ground—or into your pet’s skin, ear, or eye.

Mowed heron's bill, seeds growing beneath the mower blades, city property.

It has a tap root, but it can easily be pulled from damp soil by grabbing the entire plant at the crown.  In dry soil, it can be cut off its tap root below the crown with pruning scissors when seeded and the root will die, being an annual gone to seed.

 

 A lone heron's bill, growing in Red Death on city property

Cheat grass has just begun to bloom, showing itself as it stretches out 2-3 feet high.  It also has sticker seeds when ripe, merely sharp enough to penetrate clothing, particularly socks, and your pet’s fur, of course.  It is a major source of fire danger in this area, along with other dry, annual weeds.

Cheat, city property on Spruce at Brownell, and neighbor's road side

 

Fortunately, this annual grass, like most other annual weeds, is easy to pull in bloom, even in dry soil; the roots shrink greatly as the seed stalk grows.

A single cheat plant in old nugget bark on weed barrier cloth, City property on Brownell.

But few grasses are easy to pull if one cuts them as or before they bloom, but before they ripen seed.  Annuals grow more root and seed stalks every time they are cut, until they ripen seed below cutting height.  The same goes for heron’s bill and most other annual broadleaf weeds.  Weed control is seed control.  Cutting is not seed control unless you scalp the ground, cutting at or below the crown.

This especially applies to fox tails, another fire hazard sticker; they grow full-sized heads even at two inches tall in a lawn, and their seeds are large and totally annoying as they drop off and stick in stuff.  The only way to get rid of them is to pull the plants before the heads fall apart.

Dock is also flowering and can be pulled.  It is a broadleaf weed that puts up a stalk of green incomplete flowers 3-5 feet tall; its leaves are lanceolate with wavy edges.  Before it flowers, it is impossible to pull it without sinking a shovel beside it; the leaves just break off the crown, and they keep growing back every time you tear them off the large root.  But once its flowers are showing, the stalk is strongly attached to the root, and it pulls out.