Did you know that used coffee grounds and tea bags are an excellent addition to your compost heap?  Many are under the wrongful impression that used coffee grounds add acidity to their compost and may potentially harm plants or that used tea bags may be a problem.  This is actually untrue.  Fresh coffee will add acidity, but used coffee has imparted it’s acidity to the bitter brew and the grounds themselves are usually of a 6.5 or higher pH – about neutral.  Tea, whether fresh or used, imparts no acidity to speak of at all.

What’s more, used coffee grounds and tea add a lot of nitrogen to the mix as they are about 12-20:1 carbon to nitrogen (C:N).  If you’re a gardener or if you’ve read our recently published composting chapter for The SHTF Garden, then you understand the three macronutrients and how valuable nitrogen is.

Most coffee is brewed through a filter and most disposable filters and tea bags are made of paper or cotton fiber, which are biodegradable.  That means the whole shebang: filter, used grounds/leaves and all, can be thrown onto the compost heap.

Two Methods of Composting Coffee & Tea

Here are two ways to utilize used coffee grounds or tea:

1. directly into the garden beds or
2. on the compost heap itself when it’s about halfway to completion.

If you drink coffee or tea regularly, then you’ll have a fresh supply.  Those used grounds and tea leavings can be saved in a sealed container for later use.  They may harbor mold, but this will quickly die when exposed to the air.  Smart gardeners will save their used grounds and teas like this until they have a good supply of them or the time is ripe for their use.

If spreading directly on the garden, they can be put in between plants or down rows to soak their nutrients into the soil.  Spread them evenly in a sprinkled layer  (very, very thin) and then cover with a thin layer of compost and/or mulch.

To add them to a compost heap, it’s best to add them about halfway through the compost’s “cooking” process.  Add it when stirring the heap and mix it in well, keeping most of it towards the center of the heap.  Used coffee and tea composts quickly and will release nitrogen as it does so, most of which should be trapped by the heap’s ingredients to make it available to plants once added to the garden’s soil.

Be sure there is plenty of carbon material in the compost to absorb the nitrogen (roughly 3 times as much as there is grounds or tea is a good rule of thumb).

You’ll find that your plants love these brews as much as you do!

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