Do you love Starbucks? Your plants do!

I love plants, and I especially like potted plants because I can put them anywhere I want and move them whenever I like. It’s fun for me to go to the garden center of the local home improvement store and just buy an interesting looking potted plant. Then When I get home, I start looking it up on the internet, learning about it’s characteristics.

One thing I didn’t know when I first started to develop an interest in plants, is that they all need to be fed.

When I found this out, I thought it was ludicrous. Plants need food? Why on earth? They drink out of the ground and make their own food from sunlight, right? Well sort of. Plants need nutrients in the soil to thrive. If they are in nutrient poor soil for long enough, they can die. What do they like? Nitrates. Nitrates are a by product of bacterial consumption of organic matter. That’s why compost and manure make such good fertilizers. Decomposing organic matter is a rich source of nitrates, and plants love it. This is “plant food”.

I went to the garden section last night to get some plant food for my potted friends. I was a bit miffed to see what I was expected to pay for a small bottle of liquid fertilizer. I’m not a tightwad, but I don’t like to spend more than I should.

I haven’t had coffee for a while because I’ve been trying to keep my hands from shaking. But when I was drinking a pot a day, I used to give the wet grounds to the plants, just sprinkling them on the soil, or mixing them with potting soil when I repotted them. This is organic matter of the highest quality, and really makes for good eatin’ as far as the plants are concerned. The only thing to remember is to give them regular coffee grounds, nothing flavored and no decaf. No kidding!

I didn’t feel like I should pay for the commercial liquid plant food so I made my own with coffee. I brewed a pot of regular coffee and mixed it four parts water to one part (liquid) coffee. After it cooled, I simply watered the plants with it. I’ve done this before, and the plants drink it like it like nectar. I makes them very happy little green guys.

Because it’s watered down, I have never had a problem with the coffee fertilizer changing the PH of the soil too dramatically, although you should probably monitor the PH if you are actually mixing the grounds in with the soil.

Now for the best news of all: Many Starbucks locations save their used coffee grounds just for gardening folk to have - for free! I got a whole bag of premium coffee grounds, the finely ground kind, for the asking. I would guess I got about four pounds and a smile from the girl behind the counter. Can’t beat that!