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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:01 pm 
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Any kind of wet organic matter is going to get moldy if you don't do something like freezing it. But what a waste of good freezer space.

I think you should set up a grid and work through it by adding each batch of grounds to the next spot on your grid as you get them.

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Jun 29, 2009 9:07 am 
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i had some grounds that I had in a plastic bag that were still really wet and it went anerobic "stinky", I think it would be a good idea to dry them out to the consistency of a moist potting soil and then store them in the bucket with a loose fitting lid so some air gets in there. Now when I get my bags of grounds I mix them right into the mulch as a top dressing for my living mulch, the worms love it.


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 9:09 am 
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I'm convinced you cannot completely dry out coffee grounds. I used to live in a hotel away from my family for weeks at a time. In my spare time I collected and dried the coffee grounds from the hotel. First I drained the moisture from the bottom of the grounds. I scooped out the grounds from the top of the container where they were the driest and would combine them into a larger batch. Then I microwaved the grounds to further dry them. Microwaves only react with water and oils so in theory, once the grounds were no longer heated by the microwaves, all the moisture should have been cooked off. Then I would put them into a large Rubbermaid bin. Every time I tried this I had mold growing on them within 24 hours. I gave up on the idea of completely drying them and just collected them in the bin, mold and all. At least they were not dripping wet anymore.

Having had that experience, if I wanted to collect large quantities of coffee grounds, I would try this: spread out lots of large cardboard on the driveway and scatter the coffee grounds on a hot, sunny day. The cardboard will wick a lot of the moisture away and the sun will dry everything. You have to periodically push the grounds around because the layer right above the bottom layer will not wick out as much of the moisture. Don't use a broom to move the grounds around because the wet grounds want to climb right up into your broom and stay there. I'd use another piece of cardboard. Collect the grounds before the sun goes down because they will absorb the humidity as it rises in the evening.

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:57 am 
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What a lot of work! I vote to throw them in the garden or compost as-is when you get them and use all of that energy and resourcefulness for something else! :)

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 6:40 pm 
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that does sound like a lot of work. I keep them in buckets with the lids off in my shed, and they dry out on their own in a few weeks. There are layers of the blue green mold and the grounds crumble when you squeeze the chunks. I break them up as I prepare my beds and mix left overs in the top layer of mulch as a side dressing and bio stimulant. good worm food and even better when the worm is done with it!
Cheers!

as far as composting animals, add some lime where ever you bury it and it will dissolve the bones as well. It's not recommended that you add lime to the whole pile as it releases nitrogen from the pile.

can you believe this thread is still going?


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Fri Aug 28, 2009 9:22 pm 
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Too bad it isn't longer! A lot more people should be learning the basics of something so useful and important as how to make a good compost pile.

I recently learned about something called a "keyhole" garden, based upon the small enclosed space with compost in the middle, particularly good for urban gardeners with little space. Coffee grounds and compost would be perfect there.

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 8:12 pm 
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Coffee grounds do a very nice job of heating up a cool pile for me... I like that they are already in small particles too.

The meat argument never really made sense to me (ditto dog c*** and other items). I don't put the dog poop in simply because I have my hands in the pile too much and the ick factor gets me but I spray the poop with a mixture of compost tea and molasses and effectively compost it into the lawn so quickly it is a non issue (3 dogs, very small back yard for them to poop in.

I'm actually anxious to get meat scraps - my pile has a layer of soldier fly grubs at the top of it and keeping those little maniacs happy is hard work.

If you add too much meat into a pile it will smell awful, especially if that meat is fish. FWIW I find that if you add a a bit of molasses it kills the odor quickly and you get that wonderful 'incredible shrinking compost pile' situation going on.

If it is organic, it composts. I started composting because I had a business that had roughly 30-50 carboard boxes coming to my house every week. I had no easy way to recycle them so I started tearing them up, spraying with a little molasses and putting them into the bin. that, yard waste, food scraps, sawdust, coffee grounds and yes, dead animals. I get rats in my garden and the chain of events is: Rats eat my garden, trap catches rat, rat goes in compost bin, compost goes into ground, ground feeds tomatoes next year. Hey, we're all compostable

Makes ya wanna start a chorus of akuna-matata don't it?


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:42 pm 
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I think I've seen those soldier fly grubs here in a bin I had going during the winter. It really got going when spring came and the contents liquified. Even for a naturalist that was one of the grossest surprises, the day I took the lid off of that bin.

I don't put meat in because I couldn't keep my dogs out of the compost if I did.

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:52 pm 
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Northwesterner - probably what you had - big, slightly flat maggot? They will absolutely go to town if they get plenty of food and reduce it to vermicompost overnight. Halloween is always a treat for me, those things will go through pumpkins like an NFL offensive line hitting the all u can eat buffet.

Sometimes after a heavy rain they will migrate in great numbers and it looks like something out of a sci-fi movie... like a meteor hit and they are the little grubs that disperse and turn the townspeople into zombies.


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:47 pm 
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As I recall they were kind of flat, but they were quite pale in color. And really active. I've looked through my photos, I thought I might have snapped a couple, but if I did, I can't find them.

So if you raise them somewhere else you just dump them into the compost and let them go to town?

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 9:45 am 
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Define 'bad'.

If you leave them lying around wet they will break down and you will get the mold/fungi discussed above, they also have quite a smell to them.

Some folks put them right out into the beds, good fertilizer, others compost them.

Personally, I like to use them with the compost for a few reasons
1. I don't think even molasses heats my compost the way coffee does and the coffee is cheap
2. Sometimes I'll go behind the maintenance crew in my subdivision and get bags of grass clippings when they scalp in Fall/Spring - that's a lot of dry brown grass typically and the espresso pucks are fine powder once you break them up - they seem to coat the slow composting materials and speed them up... I like fine, finished compost and I am impatient. I put 20 pounds of coffee into my full bin which had cooled a bit Saturday afternoon and by Sunday morning there was steam coming out of the holes and the level dropped a foot or so.

Sunday did smell a bit :-)

So perhaps if you compost it first you lose some of the fertilizer benefits as it breaks down but you wind up with a rich, black, odorless compost with a lot of potassium and a slightly lower PH.... always nice if you have alkaline soils.


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:03 am 
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I've used up the last of the interim clay littler and made the switch over to the Nature's Miracle cat litter (I mentioned it elsewhere on the site) that is made of ground corn cobs (not the kernels, just the cob). So I'll be putting my cat litter out on the compost now.

I was using this type before, under another name, but it had no information about what the actual material was (I liked it because it wasn't full of clay dust). I did some research to find this litter (WalMart discontinued it) and found the origins with the 8 in 1 pet products company (they make the Skunk Odor Remover that worked so well on my dogs a year ago, and they also make some of the good enzyme remover stuff for carpets, and my cats tested that product several times).

I don't drink coffee, I drink tea, and my tea bags do go out onto the compost, but I don't notice much of a bang for those little shredded leaves. I should start picking up grounds at area coffee shops.

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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:27 am 
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I found a great source of grounds at a local church. They serve free coffee and have about 6000 people at the sunday services. I supplied them with buckets and I pick them up once week. I get anywhere from 100-200 pounds of grounds from that one stop per week. The coffee shops are great but don't have the volume to make it really worth while for me, but someone else may have to time to run all around to get them. I want to start some worm bins with the grounds that I have collected. Anyone growing worms in coffee as the main bedding material?


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 12:52 pm 
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Years ago I remember my Dad raising worms (for fishing) and he used only coffee grounds, newspaper and cardboard. These were in an old metal wash tub, kind of deep, kept in our basement -he got loads of worms with no odor except that good compost smell . My mom would take some of the worm castings and use them in her garden - she had the best roses in our area!


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 Post subject: Re: coffee grounds
PostPosted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 4:01 pm 
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northwesterner wrote:
As I recall they were kind of flat, but they were quite pale in color. And really active. I've looked through my photos, I thought I might have snapped a couple, but if I did, I can't find them.

So if you raise them somewhere else you just dump them into the compost and let them go to town?


yeah, that's them, they start out pale white like a regular maggot but then they outgrow the houseflie larvae, get more tan and flat as they grow and finally go to a gray/brown. Seem to stay in that stage a long time.

They stay in the bin - I don't move them to it. The bin I have is one of those city-type large trash bins with a few hundred holes drilled in it. The SF larvae were a surprise when they showed up several years ago. Sometimes I have thousands, other times I have only a few but they always come back when the food is there now that they know where the bin is. After dumping in a few hundred pounds of pumpkins or lots of watermelon I've had times where there were 4-6" of wriggling larvae on the surface of the bin. When there too many they wind up getting turned tot he middle of the pile when it is hot, they die off and feed the next genration.

akuna matata baby.


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