Coffee beans give gardeners a second hit

A daily fix of coffee is helping many Auckland cafe customers improve their gardens  - and minimise coffee guilt.

Cafes of all sizes, from Parnell’s boutique Rosehip Café to large franchise corporations like Esquires and Starbucks, are giving their used coffee grinds to customers for use in their gardens.

Cafes and customers alike have taken initiative by encouraging each other to use coffee grinds as fertiliser and compost.

Burnt coffee grinds are an inevitable by-product of coffee-making, with a medium sized café like Esquires on Lorne St producing two to three compacted large bags of compacted grinds each week.

Starbucks promotes recycling coffee grinds on its website, but smaller boutique cafes often have no idea of the benefits of grind on gardens until a regular customer requests to take the coffee grind home.

Parnell resident Bruce Pratt-Phythian noticed women in his office collecting coffee grinds from the staff room, and made some enquires first with his colleagues and then on Google.

“I had a lemon tree that wasn’t doing so well. I thought if I put the grinds around it would do better, and then I thought, why not make a garden.”

He approached his local café Rosehip and asked to have their coffee grinds.

He initially encountered some problems. The rubbish would be collected early, or he wouldn’t make it to the café before collection time.

His problems were solved when a friend gave him a large wheelie bin which he took to Rosehip, where staff obligingly fill it with grinds throughout the week.

Pratt-Phythian would like to see further steps taken in recycling throughout the food industry.

He says usually when he unpacks the bags the grinds are mixed with other rubbish, paper, bottle tops and milk lids.

“They don’t separate the food waste. The council should encourage cafes and restaurants to do that, and give them some sort of certification.

“New Zealand could be doing much more than it does.”

The owner of Esquires on Lorne St, Vim Kumar, says he had no idea of the benefits of coffee grinds until a staff member started taking the coffee grinds home.

He says he now takes much of the grind home himself.

“I take it to my gardens and to my family. They’re all into gardening. We grow all our own veggies.”

Because his café was producing too many grinds for Mr Kumar alone, he started recommending it as a gardening aid to some of his regular customers.

He now has around four or five people collecting the grinds regularly.

Coffee grinds make rich fertiliser alone or, mixed with compost, are especially good for acid loving plants like azaleas.

Pratt-Phythian’s success with coffee grinds has inspired him to extend his garden to what was once a paved area in his backyard.