Grounds for Gardens

Living in the high desert means we have crummy soil; you can learn more about our challenges of gardening in the high desert in this blog post. We do many things to amend our soil and some of those things include composting year-round with food scraps our chickens can't eat. Foods we keep away from our birds include citrus, potato peels, onions, eggshells, and bananas. 

Although at times our chickens do fly out of their run and sneak into the compost piles, and snack on scraps I'd rather they stay away from, but we try not to worry too much about that when it happens. 

We also compost our chickens' soiled straw bedding, leaves, pine bark, horse and cow manure, old potting mix, and biochar. 

One major soil amendment that we have been including this year is coffee grounds.

Bags and bags of FREE coffee grounds!

We have three Starbucks in our town, one in Albertson's, one in the Mavrick casino, and another one in the Smith's parking out. Out of the two that we have visited, only one store that saves their grounds is the one inside Albertson's. For us, this works out perfectly, because we don't gamble so we have no need to go into the Starbucks in the casino, and we don't drink Starbucks coffee, heck, I don't drink any coffee, so we don't ever go into Starbucks to buy anything, but we do go to Albertson's to buy their heavy whipping cream, vitamins, and their mondo G.T.'s Kombuchas. Whenever we are in there, which is at least one a week, we will scoop up most of their bags of grounds, and, again, they're FREE! 

The bags come full of grounds and filters, and they can be dumped directly into your compost, no need to pull out the filters, they compost too! The filters are just more brown materials for your pile. 

If you want to learn more about what brown and green materials are that can go in your compost, check out this article from The Spruce.

If you are looking to get your hands on grounds for your gardens, be sure to check with your local Starbucks too!