This week, the Doc is going a little off topic, he will chat about a new initiative from Neutrog using coffee grounds. Hi Uwe….

Hi Graham, the idea of using spent coffee grounds has been floating around at Neutrog for a number of years, and now we have gotten this project off the ground. Why is this important? Well in Australia approximately 6 billion cups of coffee are drunk every year - that is a lot of coffee grounds - and a lot of that waste goes to landfill. So Neutrog have teamed up with FoodBank, and one of the big petrol retailers who serve a lot of coffee, to recover this resource and make a useful product, a fertiliser called Human Beans. The proceeds of which go back to FoodBank to feed people in need.

What a great initiative, and the use of coffee grounds in gardens has been around for a while.

I know my parents used to have a frangipani and it was always given the coffee grounds. Whether it did any good I will never know, but it was a happy plant. So some evidence suggests that coffee grounds do stimulate plant growth, however, this seems to be limited to composted material. Fresh grounds have been shown in some cases to inhibit plant growth. It is only after composting coffee grounds that they release their full potential for plant growth. Therefore the material collected will come into Neutrog and be composted, which breaks down the inhibitory compounds. The composted material will then be made into pellets and sold as a fertiliser back to the same people who have their coffee in the morning. It's a great cyclical system.

So what are some of the benefits of coffee for plants?

Well from your bee stories we know that bees are attracted and go crazy pollinating plants that produce caffeine. Also there are reports that the humic compounds in coffee can help hold onto nutrients in the soil. On top of this there is the suggestion that coffee grounds may reduce nematodes by inhibiting their egg laying capacity. There are also other reports that indicate that coffee grounds can inhibit the growth of pathogenic fungi, while at the same time encouraging the proliferation of beneficial fungi such as Trichoderma. Furthermore, most people would have heard about the idea that coffee grounds can stop snails and slugs. So, there are many reported benefits, some of which are likely to be true and others potentially a myth, and this where I come into the equation. It is my job to sort fact from fiction. So, I will be testing Human Beans for these potential benefits. I already have a range of pathogens in the lab for testing and I have some nematodes as well. We will look at the effectiveness of coffee grounds for these benefits, and perhaps just as important, we will determine whether this works at the levels where you might apply Human Beans in your garden. Above all, every kilo of Human Beans sold will allow FoodBank to provide 5 meals.

That is some story and a load of work for you and the others at Neutrog.
If people want to follow this development, they can do so by subscribing to the Neutrog newsletter via the website Neutrog.com.au

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