We're All Addicted
I've been holding off on this post for awhile, to see how things would take shape before I drew any conclusions.
For those of you who don't know me, my favorite hobby for the past few years has been learning how to roast green coffee beans and extract the best flavor possible from them. While I don't drink as much of the stuff as most people assume upon hearing that I've decided to cut out the middle-man and roast my own, it's fair to say that I'd be very sorry to have my supply cut off. In fact, despite trying to find local sources for almost everything we use in daily life - with very mixed results - for me, coffee is one of those untouchable items that are beyond examination.
Over the years, I've built several coffee roasters and learned how to make coffee according to the traditions in Cuba, Vietnam, Turkey, and Italy (well, it's real espresso, at any rate). I've roasted in modified popcorn poppers, cast-iron skillets, and most recently a custom-designed drum roaster made from a pasta pot and attached to my grill. It's fair to say that if it's related to coffee, I'm interested.
Imagine my surprise when this hobby crossed paths with my attempt to grow food here at home. This year, I made another modest attempt to grow some fresh vegetables in the back yard. Nothing too aggressive, basically just tomatoes, peppers, and a few herbs. It started out as an attempt to supplement the vegetables I felt we were likely to get from our CSA subscription at Rosie's Organic Farm, for those things that we use in great quantities. I did a fair amount of reading and listening to improve my chances for a successful garden, especially in light of my last attempt at growing tomatoes here in Florida, which was a complete flop. The caterpillars only spared one or two tomatoes for us to eat.
One of the podcasts I found then - and still listen to religiously - was the Alternative Kitchen Garden. This is a great podcast out of somewhere in urban England run by a freelance writer named Emma Cooper. After listening to many episodes on my daily dog walk I checked out her website, where I found a lot more than just the podcast. Buried in a collection of great articles covering all sorts of gardening topics, I found one on coffee in the garden entitled How To Compost With Coffee. Considering the pound of coffee I go through every two weeks or so, I thought it would be a great thing to find some use for all that spent coffee other than throwing it away. I cut the recipe from idea #5 on that list down to the point where it would work with the endless empty juice containers we generate, and started brewing the coffee equivalent of sun tea. Since I mainly drink espresso, this worked out to about a puck and a half (three shots' worth of grounds) per half-gallon container...the rest of that half gallon is plain old tap water.
Since watering my garden with this stuff every couple of weeks (it takes awhile to generate enough espresso pucks for a batch) for the past few months, I'm proud to report that I have eight-foot-tall cherry tomatoes and three-foot-diameter parsley patches! Every new vegetable I plant, I water in with coffee water. The powdered pucks that are too difficult to add to juice containers get sprinkled over the flower gardens, or go into the compost...none of it goes to waste any more.
Coffee water is a perfect example of the things I read about on a regular basis these days, where things typically regarded as trash can provide incredible benefits, if you know how to use them. I'm amazed at how well my used coffee can nourish a garden; it never fails to perk up anything it touches!