Composting coffee grounds is a great way to enrich your soil with valuable nutrients, helping you grow a variety of vegetables, fruits, and flowers—especially at high altitudes.
What Grows Well in Evergreen, Colorado?
If the good weather has you excited for spring, you might be thinking about starting seeds indoors to get a head start on your garden. At 8,000+ feet, some plants thrive better than others. Root vegetables like carrots and potatoes handle cold nights well. Short-season crops like peas, beans, and lettuce grow successfully. Hardy fruits such as raspberries, strawberries, currants, and gooseberries can withstand high-altitude conditions.
For first-time high-altitude gardeners, consider using raised beds for better soil warmth and drainage, and mulch to protect roots from temperature swings. Coffee grounds make for excellent mulch.
Best Practices for Composting
To keep your compost balanced, mix nitrogen-rich coffee grounds with carbon-rich materials like leaves and sawdust. Most composting pros aim for a 2:1 ratio of browns to greens to maintain a healthy compost. To keep the bears away, many people go for a 3:1 ratio of browns to greens. Spread coffee grounds evenly and mix them with banana peels, apple cores, eggshells, and yard waste to prevent mold and anaerobic conditions, which can attract pests.
-
Browns include (carbon rich): dead leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, sawdust, eggshells and low-quality household paper products that are shredded or cut up, like tissue paper, egg cartons, paper towels, junk mail, newspaper, paper bags, and cardboard rolls.
-
Greens include (nitrogen rich): coffee grounds, banana peels, apple cores and vegetables.
Regularly turn your pile so materials compost more quickly.
Do not add meat scraps or bones to your compost pile unless it is set up to keep wildlife out. Many people choose to put these items in the trash, freeze them to drop off for composting (more on this below), or bury them by pit-composting or trench-composting. If you want to compost meats and scraps, make sure you have a system in place to keep all wildlife, especially bears out. This could include an enclosed container like a tumbler, a lining under your pile, and an electric fence around the pile. Composting is great for the environment, but not wildlife, so making sure to have a fool proof space to compost is essential to keeping the balance and the peace.
If composting feels like too much work, and it can be with the wildlife up in Evergreen, many people simply use coffee grounds as mulch by sprinkling a thin layer directly on the soil. However, be sure to mix them with the soil so they don’t form a water-repelling barrier. And always let coffee grounds cool before adding them to compost, as hot grounds can kill beneficial microbes.
If you have compostable materials but don’t plan on backyard composting, check out Evergreen’s Sustainability Alliance, where you can drop off your compost at Bergen Park, and they’ll do it for you! And a bonus is that you can compost more. Unlike backyard composting, at this drop-off location, you can dispose of ALL your kitchen scraps like meat, bones, cheese, avocado pits, onions, and orange peels. If you participate in this program, come May, you can pick up composted soil to take back to your own garden.
By composting your coffee grounds and other materials, you’ll reduce waste and enhance soil health—a win-win for you and the planet.