I work at Borders Books in the cafe. One of the things we do in the cafe is save our coffee grounds. Sounds weird, right? I know. I thought so, too. Every 90 minutes when we brew a new pot of coffee, we dump the grounds into an empty coffee bean bag (a big one, too) that we save when when we’ve used all the beans. Once the bag is full, which only takes about 3 days, we seal it up and put a sticker on it and set it out for our customers to take home free. I asked about this when I first started working there. I was curious as to what it was all about. Apparently coffee grounds are great fertilizer for your garden. They have a low acidity, but still retain their nutrients. You can also use them in your compost pile, though I’m sure those of you who have one already know that.

I’ve decided to start saving my coffee grounds to do this for my plants at home. Since I brew coffee every day and only have a few plants, I shouldn’t need too much to fertilize all of my plants.

Just wanted to pass along this green tip for all of you plant lovers. If you don’t drink coffee, but have a Borders around with a cafe (maybe Starbucks does this, too, since the cafe is technically Starbucks), go pick up some free coffee grounds for your gardens

General, Going green | 3 Comments »

I have no picture of the “before” for today’s tackle. It was sort of an impromptu thing. A few months ago, we bought a big potted plant with 6 different herbs and a tomato plant. In my kitchen window a basil plant has been sitting and so has Zach’s pea plant that he planted at school. All of these things have needed re-potting in bigger (or separate) pots for quite some time. The poor little kitchen basil plant looked all but dead, or dying, anyway. And Zach’s pea plant had nearly overtaken the basil plant and had grown up my window! There are even 2 little pea pods on it!

So, tonight while at WalMart, we picked up a couple of pots and some potting soil and decided to replant our herb garden appropriately. Here is the end result:

The kitchen window planter has (from l to r) rosemary, sage, oregano and dill

The left planter has the 2 basil plants together (the one from the kitchen window and the one from the big planter). The right planter has the tomato plant (with 3 little tomatoes!) and the parsley, which really took off and nearly took over the whole pot!

This last little pot is Zach’s pea plant from school. I really never expected a school plant to do so well! He’s so happy about it. As you can see, we had to rig some thin dowel rods and loosely tie the pea plant up. Maybe we’ll have a bunch of pods by the weekend?

General, Going green, blogging, food, memes, pictures | No Comments »