20-07-2004, 10:03 PM
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Coffee Grounds--TOO MUCH??? nearly short story
(Pat Kiewicz) wrote in message ...
I think you should take samples to send off for a professional soil test.
It is very likely that you have a severe shortage of calcium, your pH is
trending acid, and your soil seems to have gone over to some sort of highly
organic muck. (What little I know of muck soils is that they need careful
handling and are often superb for certain crops -- in the natural state where
they generally overlay subsoils rather than blacktop or bedrock.)
I think you almost certainly should add minerals to your soil such as ground
limestone and greensand. But get a soil test first. It might be that dolomitic
limestone (contains magnesium) might be be the best type of limestone
to use.
I've seen wildly different analyses for NPK in coffee grounds. According
to the University of Idaho, dried grounds are 2-36-0.7 (very high in P) but
are given as 1.99-0.36-0.67 by others (primalseeds.org is one) and both
of them can't be right. Someone obviously misplaced a decimal point --
two orders of magnitude is a HUGE variation. If the UI number is true, you
have seriously overdone the P -- but I suspect that is the bogus number.
IN any case, you put too much of a single good thing into your beds and
have ended up with trouble.
We collect 4 or more 5 gallon buckets of coffeegrounds per week during the
summer, but these are composted with leaves and other materials (or sometimes
mixed with shredded leaves for a surface mulch) and NEVER tilled in fresh.
I generally agree that Mg or Ca could be trouble spots.
coffee is quite extreme in nutrient profile and pH (BTW, clearly 0.36
is correct. Even wood ash, which is pure minerals, or rock phosphate,
do not have that concentration). If the bulk of nutrients is coming
from coffee, extra P ad K are needed.
I till in nothing and make sure to always balance acid things (wood
chips and coffee) with some wood ash, which has a pH of 10.4 and is
50% Ca and about 10% Mg (I have a wood stove and I store the ash in my
garage for spring and summer use). That does not yet balance
everything (where is the P?), but it is a good start. wood ash will
always be better than lime because it has a better nutrient profile
(besides Ca and Mg, it is 3% P and 8% K for example) and acts very
fast. Probably at this stage of the game (need a fast acting amendment
to try and get a crop out of these things), if I were to do things
blindly, a mixture of wood ash and bone meal would get those plants
kick-started. In fact, given a pH of 6.2, one could add 0.03 lb per
sqft and the pH would not go above 6.7.
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