On useful things...like coffee

I'm not a big coffee drinker.


That might be the understatement of the century. I like the smell and the taste is ok, but I rarely drink coffee. My most notable exceptions to this are sleepy mornings of which I have few since my back has been corrected, Saturday mornings at my parents house which are for bonding with my mum and sister and prior to tattoo appointments  for my obligatory get psyched up and maintain the sugar levels intake. Because of this, I've never had a steady supply of spent coffee (grinds? grounds?) to use in my garden.

Until! Until I used my little noodly brain and realised that I work for an internet company. People who work at internet companies are normally composed of coffee. They subsist on it. At least, the nerdy sleepless ones who are compelled to spend hours of their time post-work time playing computers games do. Luckily, I work with those people and we have coffee machines everywhere. Different kinds, too. Fully manual enormous cafe style machines which I have no idea how to use and which have handy little buckets placed conveniently close for emptying coffee grounds into. Automated machines into which you place whole beans and which dispense the energy giving elixir at the touch of a button and hide coffee grounds within neat little buckets for the taking.

I've even thought about asking my local coffee shops if they do anything, you know, special with their coffee grounds or if they'd like to save them for their friendly neighbourhood..me.

That's right. I'm that girl. The one who uses the things that no one else wants. I really have been getting a bit of a reputation for it as well, since I prance around the kitchens on several floors of our building with a resealable bag, explaining the benefits of adding coffee to acid-loving tomatoes and compost bins to every fellow staff member who raises an eyebrow. My tomatoes seem to have appreciated the addition of coffee to my garden beds, although some of my workmates seem to have visions of over caffinated vegetables when I explain my plans to them.

I don't mind though. The best part about bringing home the spent coffee grounds, better than getting something for nothing, better than saving something so useful from landfill...

My compost smells amazing.