What Are The Best Soil Amendments
To amend soil means to improve it with additional materials. These soil amendments or soil conditioners improve the physical nature of soil. They reduce compaction, aerating the soil to allow water and nutrients to more easily move through it and reach plant roots.
Some of the most common and homemade soil amendments are: used coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, banana peels, wood ash, and a DIY liquid fish emulsion.
Coffee Grounds
Adding coffee grounds in the garden has many benefits: for compost, fighting slugs, staining benches, compost tea, growing mushrooms, and more. Even noticed at your favorite coffee shop bags of used coffee grounds? Have you tried mixing coffee grounds into compost? How about using coffee grounds as fertilizer? Don’t throw away those used grounds. They are just as valuable as the coffee you brewed from them. Here’s a list of seven ways you can use coffee grounds in the garden as a soil amendment.
1. Coffee Grounds as Mulch
Coffee grounds make an excellent ground mulch, especially for acid-loving plants. Plants like:
| Azaleas | Flowering Camellias | Huckleberry |
| Begonias | Fragrant gardenia trees | Juneberry |
| Blueberry bushes | Holly bushes | Rhododendrons |
| Trillium grandiflorum |
Funny fact: the dark brown remains of your morning coffee will turn your hydrangea flowers bright blue.
Evergreen trees are also fond of acidic soils, as are dogwood trees, magnolia trees, willow oaks, and beech trees. Garden vegetables that prefer slightly acidic soil include peppers (all types), radishes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, eggplant, tomato plants, parsley, and rhubarb. When you mulch with coffee, spread a layer about ½ inch thick or your grounds will mold quickly and make your soil too acidic.
2. Add Used Coffee Grounds to Plants and Your Compost Pile
Adding and mixing used coffee grounds into soil is a good way to build the soil structure. The perfect place to start is to add coffee grounds and grass clippings to the compost pile. Coffee is a good source of nitrogen (contains 1.5% by weight) and you can include it to the plant’s nutrition thru compost coffee grounds.
However, it is also important to keep in mind the acidity of coffee grounds. Balance this out with yard scraps, kitchen scraps, and a good source of calcium carbonate like wood ash or lime to balance out the pH and also add phosphorous.
3. Used Coffee Grounds as a Ring of Protection
Ants, slugs, and snails are garden pests that eat the fruits and veggies growing in your garden. Apart from using coffee grounds for soil amendment, you can also use coffee grounds for plant protection like a moat protects a castle. Place a protective ring of used coffee grounds around these vulnerable plants. Or try adding diatomaceous earth for controlling pests.
Slugs and snails, worms, and other common garden pests dislike the smell, acidity, and texture of coffee grounds and are repelled by them. Best of all, using this simple all natural solution is a good alternative to using toxic pesticides around your food.
4. Coffee Grounds as Fertilizer
Makes a free, effective, and easy to make liquid fertilizer. Coffee beans are full of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, copper, and magnesium. Roses love coffee grounds. Backyard flower growers like to use coffee grounds for their roses as the used grounds still contain a high concentration of these nutrients.
It is very easy to use coffee grounds as an organic fertilizer by making an effective liquid food. Put about ½ lbs. (8 oz.) used coffee grounds in a 5 gallon bucket, fill with water, and stir. Let this mixture sit a few days to allow the nutrients from the coffee to seep into the water. The resulting brew is your liquid fertilizer. This is an excellent alternative to store bought chemical fertilizers which contain harmful chemicals like petrochemicals, arsenic, and cadmium.
5. Using Coffee Grounds to Stain Your Garden Benches
After creating a beautiful edible organic garden, the last thing you need is a varnished or painted garden bench, leaching toxic chemicals into your soil every time it rains or you water your garden. An easy solution is to use natural coffee grounds to stain your garden benches. Used coffee grounds give a beautiful sepia color that will not contaminate your garden.
6. Grow Your Own Oyster Mushrooms
Used coffee grounds make an excellent substrate for these gourmet delectable ingredient. Oyster mushrooms are the easiest mushrooms to grow. Most people grow them on pasteurized straw. If you use coffee grounds to encourage plant growth, when you brew the coffee, you automatically pasteurize your mushroom substrate. All you need is a container with soil to dump your coffee grounds in and some mushroom spawn to get you started.
7. Coffee Grounds Can Be Used to Deter Neighborhood Cats
Humans and cats don’t always think alike. While we relish the smell of fresh ground coffee beans and fresh brewed coffee, cats are repelled by the same aromas. Thus, if you have some neighborhood cats digging up your garden, try spreading some coffee grounds on your soil or around the edge of your garden.
Tip: If you don’t drink enough coffee at home to supply your garden soil and plants, many coffee shops give their grounds away for free (in Marin County some Starbucks and Pete’s Coffee do this habitually).
You could also ask any coffee shop or restaurant you patronize to save their coffee grounds for you and they’d likely oblige you. You can thank them later by bringing them some beautiful fresh flowers or garden fresh veggies.
Eggshells
There are several good reasons to add eggshells to your garden. They provide nutrients, deter snails, slugs, and cutworms. They can also be helpful as a calcium supplement, if you raise laying hens. This is a guide for using eggshells in your garden.
Next time you crack open your eggs, do not be so quick to throw away the shells. Eggs are so rich in vitamins, as well as calcium, which is contained in the shell. By simply crushing or grinding up these shells, and adding them to your vegetable garden, they will provide many nutrients that might be lacking in your soil. Add to compost. My personal favorite use in the garden is to deter slugs, snails, and cutworms. They stay away, leaving flowers, plants, and vegetables intact. Just sprinkle them around your planting areas, or containers.
1. Using Eggshells in Your Garden
Especially when planting tomatoes, eggshells can really provide nutrients for your plants. There is a specific tomato ailment, blossom end rot, which can be cured by supplementing the soil with calcium (like that in eggshells).
What I do is collect my eggshells in my kitchen compost caddy, rinse them off under tap water (you can also boil them or nuke them to eliminate bacteria). Some gardeners put them in the oven for 20 minutes, then grind them in a special coffee grinder to get the pieces small. Then store them, and dispense onto the plant as needed. This is way too much trouble for me, I just hand crush the clean shells and add them directly to soil.
There is an old European tradition of eating eggshells to supplement the calcium in your own diet. But I would not recommend doing this because it is easy to overdose on calcium, and conversely, some people have trouble with absorption so they get none from eggshells.
2. Save Eggshells for Planting Tomatoes
Adding eggshells to your garden and compost is a common all natural way to add key nutrients to the soil. You can also brew a DIY homemade batch of banana peel, eggshells, and coffee grounds “compost tea.”
3. Use Egg Shells for Slug Prevention
Some gardeners have good success reducing the slug population in their garden using broken eggshells.
4. Eggshells for Birds
The calcium in crushed eggshells can be beneficial to your indoor pet birds and even chickens themselves.
Epsom Salts
Easy, economical and minimally invasive. Buy Epsom salt from a reputable source. Healthy supermarkets typically offer the best quality Epsom salt. Be sure to buy 100% magnesium sulfate. Beware of online retailers who may offer exceptional deals but cannot guarantee quality or purity.
Magnesium sulfate is an inorganic salt with the formula MgSO₄ₓ where 0 ≤ x ≤ 7. It is often encountered as the heptahydrate sulphate mineral epsomite, commonly called Epsom salt. The overall global annual usage in the mid-1970s of the monohydrate was 2.3 million tons, of which the majority was used in agriculture.
Naoki Umeda, MD, from Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine, shares valuable insights on the benefits of Epsom salts as well as its recommended usage. It’s nothing like table salt. Epsom salt was named for a bitter saline spring at Epsom in Surrey, England. It is one of many naturally occurring mineral salts, a compound of magnesium and sulfate.
Homemade Fish Emulsion Fertilizer
Sources:
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_sulfate
7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Epsom Salt – The Cleveland Clinic
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/7-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-epsom-salt/
Eggshells for Your Garden
https://www.thriftyfun.com
https://www.mamanatural.com/how-to-make-eggshell-calcium/
7 Uses For Old Coffee Grounds In The Garden
https://www.plantcaretoday.com/7-uses-old-coffee-grounds-garden.html
Easy Homemade Fish Emulsion Fertilizer
https://www.practicalgardening.blackdovenest.com/2012/03/easy-homemade-fish-emulsion-fertilizer.html