Adventures in gardening: coffee grounds into ground

Be careful when taking the top off the K-cup.

     I’ve mentioned before how I’ve been doing a bit of composting to help keep my soil healthy. I’m not hardcore committed to composting seeing as I’m sticking to eggshells and coffee grounds only. Because it’s easiest to show, I wanted to give the breakdown of using coffee grounds.

     First you need to make some coffee. This may seem obvious but the grounds must be used rather than fresh out of the can. If you use a regular 12-cup coffee brewer, your life will be made easier during this process. If you are like me and use a Keurig brewer or any other single cup brewer then things will get tedious. Remember: this is for the good of your plants so don’t give up.

The dried grounds right before going into the garden.

     The second step can be done while you’re brewing your java. Get a small pan, I used an eight-inch round cake pan, and line it with aluminum foil.  Simple enough.

     The third step is up to you on how you do this. For those with the easy 12-cup brewer, just wait for the grounds to cool off a bit then dump the grounds, sans the filter, into the aluminum foil covered pan.

      For those of you with a single-cup brewer, this is where things start to suck. Like with the 12-cup brewer, let the small cup with the grounds cool a bit so you don’t scorch yourself. After, you have to take a knife, don’t use a butter knife or you’re more of a risk to your counters, and cut the top of the cup containing the grounds. Because I use K-cups, I pierce along the edge and circle my way around until the top comes right off. Then just dump the grounds into the pan. The not so great part is usually the grounds get stuck in the small cup so just use your knife to scrape the bottom and sides.

     One thing worth noting about using single-cup brewers is it may be worth it to let a few cups pile up before you empty them. Believe it or not, there is a surprising amount of grounds in one K-cup so five or six will give you enough grounds for a garden the size of mine.

     The fourth step is preheating your oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. It may seem weird but you have to dry the grounds out before putting them to work in your garden.

     The fifth thing is baking them for 15-20 minutes. If you have a good layer of grounds then you might want to leave them in for a bit longer and if you have a small amount then keep them in for less time. Once they’re done, let them cool for at least a half hour.

     The final step in the process is sprinkling the grounds into your garden. I’m not saying hold a handful over top of the plants and sprinkle the ground like Parmesan over spaghetti. Hold your hand down close to the soil and spread it around.

     See? Not so bad or complicated. For me, it’s something I do once a week or every other week when I have the time, and brainpower to remember what I was doing, and I feel like it’s helped with keeping my soil and plants healthy.

Adventures in gardening: getting resourceful and powerful

Amazing to see how much its grown in a month!

     Just a quick note to start, no matter if you are doing a photography blog and using your garden as a subject or not, everyone should take pictures periodically throughout their gardening process because you don’t realize how much its’ grown over such a short time.

     For the most part, the drainage situation isn’t affecting the tall plants. Seeing as I have yet to pull up any of my onions or garlic, I cant speak for their progress but they look fine from the upper half.

The two celebrity tomatoes growing side-by-side.

We’ve run into a minor problem. My tomatoes are a bit too close together and I know for next year to plant them spaced apart some more but here’s some of the main issues with their current location.

     As stated before, we’ve had some serious weather these passed few weeks. About a week ago there was a huge storm cell, as in “World News Tonight” did a segment warning people of the danger and tornado risk, and all the plants on our property were at risk.

A blossom on my celebrity tomato plant.

     The winds were nothing short of incredible and damaging. Luckily most of our plants were fine. We had some stargazer lilies fall over in our flower garden and some of the tomato plants suffered. At this stage, only one of my four roma tomato plants were bent and I fixed it by taking a wooden kebab skewer and a twist tie to return it to it’s correct position. A few days later, we dealt with a day of steady rain and relatively intense wind, which resulted in me using kebab skewers on the remaining three roma tomato plants. My celebrity tomato plant has faced the weather like a true champ.

     Other than the issue of falling all over each other and getting their leaves and branches all tangled, my tomato plants are doing well. My roma plants have started blossoming and I have two tomatoes growing on the celebrity plant with blossoms opening all around.

     As for the rest of the plants, they are getting a bit out of hand. I have to search a bit for my sage plant because the basil and tomato plants are hogging the attention. Because of the high amount of basil, I finally cut some off and I’m planning to make some basil infused olive oil. It’s funny because I cut quite a bit off and it looks like I didn’t even dent the plants. Anybody want some basil?

     In other maintenance news, I’m happy to report on the weed situation. I came into this knowing one of the worst parts of gardening is weeding but it’s a necessary evil. I accepted my fate but did so begrudgingly. I don’t know why, though I have theories, I don’t seem to have many weeds. I’m betting it’s because this is a raised bed garden and not plopped on the ground waiting to be invaded. The few weeds I have pulled out have been very, very small and I’m thinking they came from the containers the plants came in. It’s definitely making it easier to like gardening. If you’ve been avoiding trying your hand at gardening because you don’t want to deal with the upkeep then a raised bed is the perfect thing for you because you don’t have to worry about weeds been the nutrient leeches they are.

     I’m hoping by the next blog post I’ll be able to report one of my tomatoes was ready to come off the vine but I feel like it may be the post after. Both are doing fine at the moment but seeing as they are celebrity tomatoes they have to get quite a bit bigger before they are ready to be picked.