After brewing a pot of coffee, most people typically throw out the coffee grounds. However, you are wasting a lot of great potential for cleaning, beauty to improving your garden when you throw the grounds out. For this reason, here are just imaginative other uses to recycle old coffee grounds for better use while saving you money in the process.
Uses for Coffee Grounds in Your Garden
If you started a compost pile, adding them to your heap can enrich the decomposing matter of leaves, peels, eggshells, and grass clippings with such minerals as nitrogen, chromium, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, iron, and magnesium, which is important for healthy soil to prep it for your garden. After all, most soil lacks what plants are needing to thrive. And what might have gone to your trash is a nontoxic fertilizer. Therefore, you also can periodically treat your plants later to give them a boost just spreading some around them.
In addition, coffee grounds also encourage nitrogen loving worms to feast so they can improve the soil by tunneling in oxygen, drain water as they recycle that improved organic matter back into the soil.
Did you know that coffee grounds also can help deal with insects that go after your plants for pest control since they are toxic to many different varieties? If you spread some around the base, you can also make it harder for pests like slugs to maneuver over the dirt to discourage those bugs from wandering closer to your plants.
How to Reuse Coffee Grounds for Cleaning
Surprisingly enough, coffee grounds have not only an abrasive texture but antibacterial properties, making them helpful as a natural eco-friendly cleaning scrub. Try tackling tough to clean surfaces or pots and pans with them with burnt food lodged in that can’t clean properly and notice the difference by making a paste of the coffee ground mixed with enough water just to moisten before adding to your cloth or sponge.
One word of caution, you need to be sure that surface or pot’s interior can take a rough exfoliating to avoid damaging them. A porous surface such as marble or granite will stain so keep this in mind.
Onions and garlic are delicious, but the odor they leave on your hands after chopping them can be hard to remove despite washing them. You can use lemon juice but spent coffee grounds also can neutralize the odor just by rubbing some on your hands. Try this and you’ll be surprised at how much sweeter your hands will smell.
Repurpose Them for Beauty
Other uses for coffee grounds are improving the appearance of cellulite that gives a lot of us, women, lumpy dimpled skin. The reason a cellulite coffee scrub can help is due to the caffeine that increases blood flow as it tightens the skin to draw out trapped fat and toxins in those troublesome areas.
Coffee grounds rubbed into your scalp can stimulate hair growth due to the caffeine. Furthermore, they have an abundance of flavonoids, antioxidants, which can benefit the health of hair so massage some used coffee grounds into your wet scalp while lingering in the tub or during your shower before rinsing out and shampooing as normal to seal in moisture for shinier and softer hair as well.
These other uses for coffee grounds are ones that can help solve some chores or spend toward extra for products that you may not need to buy. If you have other uses, please share here.
