Worm Food from Coffee Shops
February 17th, 2009
I am always looking for feedstock for my worms. While it’s great to feed them all of my food scraps, I also enjoy taking the others’ “trash” out of the wastestream. This is especially true if the waste I’m removing is good for my worms. As a case in point, coffee grounds are a great feedstock: “coffee grounds are excellent, as they are high in N, not greasy or smelly, and are attractive to worms” (link to pdf).
If you don’t drink that much coffee, these grounds typically free from coffee shops. I don’t typically haunt coffee houses, but I’ve walked in and asked at four different shops now, and gotten a positive response. How I got the grounds varied. In one Starbucks, I found a bucket with bags of grounds all wrapped up nice.
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- Starbucks coffee grounds
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- Starbucks coffee grounds bags
Another Starbucks just gave me a garbage bag full of grounds. I went to a independent coffee shop in the morning. I left a five gallon bucket with my name an number on it and was able to pick up 4.5 gallons of coffee grounds later that day.
The worms haven’t had any trouble with the grounds. As a matter of fact, the grounds disappeared into the worm bedding fairly quickly.
If you’re looking for something else to feed your worms, and have easy access to a coffee shop, consider asking them for their used grounds.
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5 Comments Add your own
1. linda brooks | April 30th, 2009 at 5:17 am
do you have to do any thing special to the grounds and can you use the filter Im just starting a worm bin in my class of three year olds Im trying to teach them and their familys about recycling and worms and bugs and how it can help your garden any tips
2. vermicomposting | May 2nd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Hi Linda,
I have not used filters in my worm bin. But filters are just paper, so they should be fine in the bin They may take a bit longer to break down.
As far as tips go, I’d buy ‘Worms eat my garbage’ and read it cover to cover. You can find a copy on Amazon for about 10 bucks (here’s my Amazon store: http://astore.amazon.com/vermandvermin-20 )
Other tips:
* start small
* only put plant wastes in the bin
* try an experiment with the compost
* keep it inside or in a half way space (garage), but out of the way
3. Earthworms used for coffe&hellip | May 13th, 2010 at 7:00 am
[...] Pssst! You should complete the cycle and vermicompost your coffee grounds. [...]
4. Joel Bennett | June 18th, 2010 at 10:33 am
Can you give any estimate on how quickly the worms processed the grounds? 1 lb per 2lbs. of worms per day? Faster? Slower? Noticing that different foods take different times and would think maybe the fine grounds would process quicker.
Would you consider doing a coffee grounds only diet for worms, or will acidity become a factor?
5. vermicomposting | July 10th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Gosh, Joel. I just dumped the grounds in the mix, and a few days later they were gone. I couldn’t even tell you how many lbs of worms I had in the bin.
The manual on vermiculture and vermicomposting (over there on the right, under links of interest) specifies that coffee grounds are acidic, so I agree with you–if you just had pure coffee grounds, the bin would get too acidic. You could mix other items that are basic with the grounds (eggshells are the only items that jump to mind).
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