A gardening content creator recently shared a tip with her 1,400 TikTok followers, informing them about where they can find free soil fertilizer.
@marcylovesplants Can't beat free 🤣🤣 #garden #gardentok #fyp #foryou #gardening #gardensoftiktok #oklahoma #gardenersoftiktok #planttok #plantsoftiktok #freegardeningtips #starbucks #coffee ♬ In The Forest (Acoustic Indie No Copyright) - Instrumental - Lesfm & Olexy
The scoop
"Can't beat free," Marcy (@marcylovesplants) captioned her video. In the video, she explained that she gets free coffee grounds from a local coffee shop and sprinkles them all over her garden beds.
"You can either add them to your compost or straight to the garden," she said.
How it's helping
According to HGTV, coffee grounds have been found to have some antimicrobial properties and can suppress some crop diseases in research conditions (although the author doubted that they would be as effective outside the lab).
As far as acting as a fertilizer, coffee grounds are high in nitrogen, which does improve soil fertility, but they may also harm certain plants by acidifying the soil and suppressing certain kinds of growth.
The article said that coffee grounds, when used as compost, can improve yields of plants like soybeans, cabbage, and sugar beets, while harming geraniums, alfalfa, and others.
"The effects of coffee grounds on seeds and plants is variable, unreliable and tough to call," the author wrote. The safest way to use coffee grounds in the garden, they concluded, is to add small amounts of them to the compost.
In a broader sense, gardening — whether you use coffee grounds or not — is a great way to improve your physical and mental health, save money, and reduce your reliance on mass-produced, globally shipped produce, which comes with big environmental drawbacks.
Although it is difficult to assess precisely, one study estimates that shipping accounts for 19% of all planet-overheating emissions from the food industry.
What everyone's saying
"My avocado tree loves them," one commenter on Marcy's TikTok video wrote. "Works great for bugs too!"
"Very cool!" wrote another.
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