Coffee by-products for garden and coop

Like most Americans, I love coffee. I make my own cold brew and have two cups of it every morning, without fail, no matter the season, while Tom prefers and makes it hot every day. Our spent grounds and filters go into our compost, of course, along with tea bags. 

Several years ago I was touring an urban garden and the owner mentioned that they used a lot of coffee chaff in their raised beds, mixed into the soil. I had never heard of coffee chaff, but filed that nugget away to explore some other time. I totally forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago in my soil class. We had a guest speaker, Alane Weber, who makes extraordinarily high-quality compost which sells for $65 per five gallon bucket (!) and is in great demand. She recommended using coffee chaff in compost, which, even though brown, is treated like a 'green' - that is, high in nitrogen, like grass clippings. 

I filed that away, until one morning when I was out adding rice hulls to the hen house. I've been enjoying the rice hulls a lot - I'm not worried, anymore, about the environmental price of sand, or the price the addition of sand would cost my own soil aggregation; instead, I'm adding a carbon-rich material which will enhance my soil and also takes a waste product out of the waste stream. But darn it, organic rice hulls are expensive. Not sustainable to my pocketbook! And I'm using more of them than I did of sand, because it doesn't sift like sand did, so I invariably put a lot of rice hulls in my compost along with the chicken manure I am removing from the hen house. Again, good for my soil, not so good for my wallet.

So I was musing about that when my brain went *ding!* and I thought, would coffee chaff work in the hen house???

And the answer to that, folks, is yes. Yes it does. Not only does it work, but it smells divine. Not only does it work and smell good, it's excellent for my compost. Not only does it work, smell good, and enrich my compost pile, it's also a by-product of coffee roasting which is rampant here. Not  only does it work, smell good, enrich my compost pile, and take something out of the waste stream, it's FREE. 

There are two downsides. It's incredibly light, so it would blow away in an unprotected area. It's also darker in color, so it's harder to see the chicken waste (which I need to do if I'm scooping it out every day).  But those two things are small complaints. I'm not sure it would make a suitable mulch, unless you applied it right before the rainy season, because it would just end up in someone's else's yard. 

I did some research (and when I say that, I mean I try to find information from universities or colleges, because there is plenty of information on the internet that isn't reliable, I know, shocker right?)  and found a very interesting academic paper on the benefits of spent coffee grounds and coffee silverskin, otherwise known as chaff. I think it's worth a read, but if you just want the sum-up, here it is: Both have excellent water-holding capacities, both are high in nitrogen (CN ration of 14-19:1), both are high in cellulose and lignins (i.e. food for microbiota), and both have decent amounts of everything from potassium to calcium. You can read the paper's conclusion for a more scholarly take on this, but in short, this stuff is awesome.

There has been a lot of internet chatter about the acidity of coffee grounds, and they are slightly acidic, but really not enough to do much to change soil pH. Also, the more I researched this, the more I saw possible evidence that the high caffeine content of grounds can actually hurt young plants. So, I think until there is more solid research on this, it might be best to add these things to your compost, rather than straight into your beds as a mulch. 

But, speaking of mulch, another fabulous by-product of coffee is those burlap bags the beans travel in. Many roasters are desperate for folks to take these off their hands (though a coffee roaster here in snobby Walnut Creek is charging a huge amount of money for theirs, UGH!). I've decided I'm going to use them as tomato mulch next year. Yes indeed! I'm always looking for a mulch to put around my tomato plants to shade the soil, retain water, and prevent weeds from germinating. So next spring, when I put my seedlings in the ground, I'm first going to cut a hole in a burlap bag, lay it on the soil, and then plant the tomato through the hole. Voila! A perfect mulch that should last the entire season, and can then be ripped up and composted afterward with the vines. I'll probably try this with other plants as well since organic straw for mulch is hard to come by. Burlap bags would also make an excellent substitute for cardboard or newspaper in sheet mulch projects. I've used it myself for that purpose, when a smaller area needs a quick fix. You could use them in perennial beds too, before covering with wood chips, as extra weed protection. Also in garden pathways. Endless uses!

So, how to get these free coffee by-products? Well, you've got to contact a roaster in your area. I contacted several before I found the right fit. Like I said, the one nearby is selling their burlap bags for a high price, and the owner told me he would not give me his chaff. He declined to tell me why, but that's ok. I moved on to Oakland and Berkeley, and bingo - I found a LOT of resources. Richard at Cafe Santana had a bag of chaff for me, plus as many bags of grounds as I could carry - which were mixed with filters, of course, and also egg shells from the breakfast crowd. He told me I could come back anytime. He had more compost than I could use, so feel free to contact him and tell him I sent you, if you want to pick some up. They do double bag it in plastic, which I suppose they have to do since it is leaky. I would recommend taking your own bins to put the bags in, or line your car with something nonporous, unless you want coffee on your seats. If you just want grounds, your local Peet's or Starbucks likely has bags of grounds they'd be thrilled to give you (not chaff, of course, since they don't roast at their locations). Highwire Coffee Roasters has a million burlap bags they'd love to give you - just contact Julia at info@highwirecoffee.com and tell her Elizabeth sent you. They also have a lot of chaff, but I just made a deal with them to pick up four bags every week, so there probably won't be enough left for you. :) However I am willing to share, just let me know what you need and we'll work something out. Highwire also bags the chaff in compostable bags which I love. Of course you could contact another roaster in the area and develop your own relationship with them, I'm sure there are any number of roasters who would like to have someone come pick up the chaff every week. 

I'm thrilled to find yet another option for organic matter with which to line the floor of the hen house and even the coop, and to improve my compost, and therefore my soil. I love taking something out of the waste stream and finding another purpose for it. The other day I had a very interesting discussion with a couple of teenaged girls, one of whom was my daughter, in which they were telling me that they often felt helpless about what to do to help the environment. I told them, girls, we may not be able to do big things. But we all make decisions every day about little things, and those are within our control. Do as many little things as you can. 

Wild Kingdom in Walnut Creek

Our tiny cottage lies about 2 miles, as the crow flies, from downtown Walnut Creek, California. Walnut Creek is a large and populous city, encompassing nearly 20 square miles, and boasting a population of over 70,000 souls. Our city parks total 250 acres, and our open spaces total nearly 3,000 acres. That's what makes our city interesting; downtown you have every amenity you can think of, complete with high-end shopping such as Tiffany's and I. Magnin, but surrounding the city on several sides are vast quantities of open space. Our house happens to be in a neighborhood that lies about a half-mile from the closest trailhead, and that open space connects to others, leading all the way to Mt. Diablo State Park. 

What this means is that, like many cities in California, crowded human habitation abuts wildlife habitat. Therefore, we get both city wildlife like raccoons and rats, and wildlife from the hills such as coyotes and foxes. And deer. Lots and lots of deer. 

Until this morning, I hadn't even really known what kind of deer we have here; they are so ubiquitous that they barely register on our wildlife radar. Of course we have had our share of deer browsing our garden, and years ago made an extension to our fence which has deterred them, for the most part, from treating our yard as an all-night buffet. We do get an occasional jumper who manages to hurl herself over seven feet of fence. October is a lean month in the hills, and if a deer is desperate enough, it'll go to any lengths to get a good meal down here in the flats. 

Turns out that we have many types of common deer in Northern California, but those in our neighborhood are likely California mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus californicus), or some variation thereof. October is rutting season; the males vie for the attention of the females, sometimes fighting to the death for the privilege to mate. Which is what we witnessed last night.

Our bedroom is on the corner of our house, which is also the corner of our street, and our two large windows face out into our south garden, the curve of Margaret drive, and then into our neighbor's front yards, two of which connect into a broad, grassy space. At about 2 in the morning, Tom and I woke to the sound of very loud crunching. We thought men were walking about in our garden, crunching the wood chips underfoot. We leapt out of bed and flew to the windows, hearts in throats. We quickly ascertained that the noise was coming from the large grassy space across the street, but it was difficult to make out what it was. For a minute we thought a coyote was hunting a deer, chasing it all over the yard. But then we realized it was two huge bucks, fighting.

They went back and forth over the two yards, causing quite a ruckus. We could hear the neighbor's dog going absolutely batshit inside his house; we were surprised no one else was up and watching this unbelievable, fierce fight. It was a clear night with many stars, but not much moon, so it seemed barely more than two shadows battling each other from yard to yard. The crunching sound was their antlers banging together and locking, and the deer grunted and whined the whole time. It was spectacular.

Finally one of the neighbors banged on their windows, and the deer ran off up the street, huffing and grunting. We got back into bed. Fifteen minutes later we heard it again, and then, the unmistakable sound of a deer in our yard. We looked out the window again and there was one of the huge bucks right there. He had crashed through some of the wires on the fence extension in his frenzy. I put on my shoes and grabbed a flashlight, intending to go out and open gates to let him out - I was worried he might calm down and start eating things! But as I went outside, he crashed through the back fence by the chicken coop, tearing out the wires in the fence and breaking several branches of a Caryopteris I have growing on the driveway side. The body that made this damage was enormous. 

It's such a wonderful thing to live in a spot that gets such awesome displays of nature. We've always enjoyed hearing the great horned owls at night, the red-tailed hawks during the day, the snuffling of an opossum near the train shed, the shuffle of a skunk drinking out of our fountain. Other visitations can be pulse-raising, such as the coyote who, for a period of few months, visited our chicken coop every few mornings just to see if he could get in. This spectacular sight of two bucks fighting will be at the top of the list for sure. I'm not sure I'd appreciate brown bears showing up in our back yard (shout-out to my friends in Idaho), but I'm glad we live in an urban area that still has plenty of nature.

The Ecology of Leaf Litter

There's a lot of ecological buzzwords that can be confusing, or we assume we know what they mean even if the real meaning is lost on us. One of those buzzwords is biodiversity, which simply means 'the variety of life in the world or in a particular habitat or ecosystem.' This concept is important, if we want our gardens to be healthy ecosystems. Well, what is a healthy ecosystem? One where the biological community of interacting organisms is robust, eating and reproducing and going about their tiny lives. And why is a healthy ecosystem important? Every species, no matter how small, has an important role to play in our environment. Depending on how you see things, our planet either evolved, or was designed to evolve, in perfect harmony. Our human life is part of that and has an important role to play. But things have gotten a bit out of balance, and our human environments have encroached on the wild ones, and we no longer live in harmony with that biological life. The loss of habitat for these creatures is staggering. If we lose this perfectly evolved system that nature has developed, we lose everything. Recently the UK paper The Guardian published an article about the decline of insect populations - it's worth a read (you can find it HERE). There is scientific evidence that all insects are disappearing - not just the highly publicized ones like bees and butterflies - but all insects. We rely on a healthy, diverse ecosystem, because we are part of it, and if it disappears, we are in serious trouble.

We may not be able to affect change on a large level, but one thing we can control is how we interact with the space directly around us, namely, our yards. We all want beautiful spaces surrounding us, and beauty is important. But do we want beautiful dead spaces? Or beautiful living spaces? I would argue that the living space is actually more beautiful because of its diversity of creatures and plants. 

One way to increase insect life in your garden is to allow leaves to accumulate, rather than raking them and disposing of them each year. Now I know there are places in your yard where you must rake. I get it - I have to clean leaves up off our driveway and sidewalks every year, so I know. Plus sometimes the leaves can make such a deep mulch that they kill certain plants. So we can agree that there are portions of the yard that need tidying. But we also all have certain parts that are tucked away, and other parts that could do with a layer of mulch. Why not leave the bulk of your leaves on the ground to decompose naturally?

It turns out that leaf litter is an important ecological habitat, harboring larvae and eggs as well as overwintering creatures. Worms, spiders, and caterpillars spend a lot of time in leaf litter, and both fungi and bacteria feed on it and convert it to nutrients for your nearby plants. The leaves are also nature's way of getting nutrients back into the soil, as they provide nitrogen when they decompose under the tree. 

The Nature Conservancy is running a campaign right now to raise awareness about the importance of letting leaves lie, and you can take the pledge to be a 'lazy gardener' at their site, HERE. There's also some great information about what leaves do for the ecosystem of your garden, and why to make brush piles around your yard, leave dead tree snags standing, and eschew chemicals. Honestly, that last point might be the most important of all: Do not use chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides on your property. 

I took the pledge this year, but honestly I've been actively working on increasing our insect population for quite some time now. We use wood chips in a large portion of our yard, which helps to harbor all these creatures, as well as provide organic matter to the soil, conserve moisture, and deter weeds. We let a lot of our leaves and plant clippings mulch naturally beneath the plants. I leave seed heads at the end of the season for the birds. I've spent years making wood piles, brush piles, and stone piles, all to attract lizards and snakes (lizards, we've got by the thousands; snakes, none that I have seen so far). As you know we try to have flowers blooming as much of the year as possible to support insect life. I haven't used any pesticides, organic or chemical, in many years (though I do use organic products in my beehive to inhibit the varroa mite load, and I occasionally use copper on my peach tree), and we have no need for herbicides, as I hand pull any weeds that come up (and they are rare). I've stopped using chemical fertilizers completely, as the high salts that result can kill soil life. (More to come on a later post about all I have been learning about soil life.)

The result of this is that our garden is always teeming with insects, of all kinds. Both 'good' and 'bad.' Predator and prey. It's a healthy, living system that brings me a great deal of joy. The other day I was doing homework at the dining room table when I saw the chickens run to the edge of their run and squawk. I went outside to see what was happening, and a neighbor had stopped by to look at the garden. She was leaning on the fence smiling. "I'm just watching all the life, " she said, as butterflies and bees flitted in the flowers in front of her. Can I just say how pleased I was? How full of satisfaction? And it's EASY, not hard. Just pledge to be a little bit of a lazy gardener. 

Edit 10/23: Just saw this article in the Guardian from Friday regarding the same issue, another good read, related to the one above. 

Towel of Awesomeness

On October 7, I removed the tomato plants from the garden, after first picking all the large green fruit that was still on the vines. I wanted to see if I could ripen the tomatoes indoors, even though they were completely green. As you know, I often bring fruit in to ripen after it breaks into color outside; that way the critters don't get to it before I do. But I felt that the truly green tomatoes would just stay green indoors, though I had high hopes for them.

So I put them on the piano the way I always do, but added a ripe apple and a towel to cover them. I figured that way the majority of the ethylene gas would be trapped in there, and ripen everything faster.

Well.... it worked! We've had easily half the tomatoes ripen under this cover. They do tend to go from ripe to extremely soft very quickly, but that's no hardship, as we eat them right away.

All the ripe tomatoes you see here were as green as the ones towards the right - they've just ripened under what Tom calls "the towel of awesomeness." Not that the towel is so awesome, I mean it's pretty cute, but what's truly awesome is the ripening factory that's going on underneath it. It's worked so well, in fact, that I decided to put unripe peppers under there as well (I pulled out the plants last week) and see if it would work for them too. I'll let you know!

Mother Earth News says this ripening process will work best at temperatures between 55-70 degrees. Perfect for our autumn-chilly house. (The magazine also says that temps under 50 will likely just rot the tomatoes before they ripen.) So I plan to do this every year, and you can too! It sure makes taking out the plants less of a heartbreak, if you can continue to have tomatoes for a month or so afterwards!

Fruit: A Little Botany Lesson

I'm taking a Terminology class as part of this semester's course load. It's a hard class, with lots of information to know and memorize. But it's also a fascinating class, and I'm learning so much about the way things in the natural world are classified. 

This past week our lecture and lab were about fruit. There are two kinds of fruit - dried and fleshy. Fruit is further divided into two more categories; dehiscent and indehiscent. Dehiscent fruit opens to release its seed, while indehiscent fruits do not open.  For example, legumes are dried, dehiscent fruit. We eat it while it's green, but if dried, the pods split along two lines of dehiscence and release the seed. Think peas and beans. Or wisteria. Or a redbud tree. 

Nuts are actually a dried indehiscent fruit, i.e. hazelnuts, acorns, or pecans. A walnut is actually a drupaceous nut. We'll get to drupes in a minute. A cashew is actually a seed. A peanut is a legume, see above.

A sunflower seed is actually a fruit called an Achene. It's a small, dried, indehiscent fruit with a hardened pericarp (ovary wall) surrounding a single seed. (The seeds of strawberry are also achenes - each of those small brown things around the outside of the red bit are the actual fruit. The part that is red and tastes good is a swollen receptacle - the bit that holds the flower.) Achenes are formed from every pistil. Each pistil becomes a separate fruit. 

Grasses and grains are Caryopsis - a dried, indehiscent fruit like an achene except it is fully fused to the pericarp. A grain of rice is a fruit, a caryopsis. Ditto a grain of wheat.

Those winged seeds that fly from maple trees every year are called Samaras - and they are a winged achene. Each contains 1-2 seeds. 

Let's move on to the fleshy fruits. Can you guess what fruits are berries?

Yep, tomatoes are berries! Peppers are berries! Eggplant are berries! A berry is a fleshy, indehiscent fruit with multiple carpels (ovaries) and multiple seeds. All, or most, of the pericarp is fleshy. That is, the part that we eat and enjoy is the ovary wall. More berries: grapes, pomegranates, kiwi, and persimmons. Oh, and bananas! Though those have the seeds bred out of them (that's another story). 

Cucumbers, melons, and squashes are a type of specialized berry called Pepo. They are all defined by a leathery rind and a fleshy interior. The ovary lacks septa, which are fleshy dividers between the locules (chambers of the ovary). So it's one big ovary. 

Citrus is also a specialized type of berry called Hesperidium. They have leathery rinds with oil cavities, and a fleshy, juicy interior divided by septa (the dividing lines between sections we eat). 

Raspberries and blackberries are also a specialized type of berry called Aggregate berries. They have clusters of many separate pistils in each flower, and each pistil forms a druplet. Sometimes strawberries are also called aggregate berries, although they are better defined as...

Accessory fruits, which is a fleshy fruit developing from something non-ovarian. Cashews are also accessory fruits. Look up a cashew flower on google, it's quite interesting looking.

An apple is a Pome, which is a specialized accessory fruit. Look at the picture below - do you see the inner ring around the seeds? That's actually the ovary, so that plus the seeds is the actual fruit. The fleshy part we enjoy is derived from the hypanthium (which is all the petals, sepals, and stamens fused together). This is also true of pears and quince.

A rose hip is also an accessory fruit, formed from a hollow leathery hypanthium which contains many achenes. 

How about peaches and plums? These you probably know as stone fruit, which are (in the world of botany) called Drupes. Drupes are a fleshy, indehiscent fruit with a stony endocarp (the innermost layer of the pericarp). So the endocarp becomes the pit, and the flesh is the mesocarp (middle layer of the pericarp).

And one last amazing kind of fleshy fruit, called Multiple fruits. Pineapples are multiple fruits! If you look at the outside of a pineapple, you'll see many different dried flower parts. Those inner parts all form many druplets that fuse together! So a pineapple is really many fruits all fused together. Mulberries fit this category, too. 

I came out of this lecture with my head spinning, but glad to know what everything REALLY is! Now you too can amaze your friends at parties. When you're biting into a jalapeno pepper, you can say "did you know peppers are actually berries?" and hopefully it won't peg you a total loser.