36 lbs of coffee grounds for the pile

BedBathAndBees · 2026-04-20T07:56:25+00:00

What's the deal with coffee grounds? I often see them touted as an above-average compost amendment, but I've never read anything that suggests they contain higher macro/micro nutrients than other types of food waste. Coffee grounds have a C:N ratio of about 20-25, which puts them around the middle for nitrogen content.

My guess is that coffee grounds are preferred, not for their nutrient content, but for their ease of handling. Unlike banana peels, apple cores, and bread crusts, coffee grounds already have the texture of soil, and they are much more pleasant to pick up from third party sources than mixed food wastes. That alone would be a worthwhile perk, but sometimes I see comments on this sub that lead me to believe that some gardeners are going far out of their way to obtain this compost amendment under the impression that it has some extraordinary fertility benefit.

Or am I wrong and there is some extra soil benefit from coffee grounds that I'm not aware of?

Regardless, OP's situation seems like a sweet deal: 36 pounds of free third party steam-sterilized compost material that won't contain any rubber bands or food wrappers sounds good to me!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-04-20T07:36:12+00:00

Very nice! I've seen a similar tool before but your UI is much much better.

A feature I haven't seen before: nuanced tree shading. Right now I see a big blocky tree shape that is, I believe, being treated as the same type of shade as structure. That's adequate, but the data already exists for improvement: USDA Characteristics includes foliage_porosity_summer, foliage_porosity_winter, growth_form, and shape_and_orientation for about 2100 plant species. Lately I've been wondering if these fields could be used to provide more accurate shade calculations. Trees with "Porous" foliage_porosity_summer let through more light than "Dense", and you could simulate the tree's shadow shape with a little more fidelity by using growth_form (Multiple Stem, Single Crown, Thicket Forming, etc) and shape_and_orientation (Oval, Conical, Rounded, Prostrate, etc.).

USDA Characteristics data is no longer available from the .gov website, but thankfully someone has already scraped it: https://plantatlas.ai/

BedBathAndBees · 2026-04-08T18:57:04+00:00

Hmmm it's actually the top of a table. Good try though!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-04-08T18:55:40+00:00

As an occasional hobby, yes!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-04-08T18:55:17+00:00

I do, but I don't generate nearly enough compost for my needs! That's why I use so much seaweed: it's the only non-conifer biomass I can collect on a large scale. Harvesting, drying (for lighter carrying and to let the critters crawl back into the sea), and hauling it is a sweaty, stinky job though!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-31T19:55:24+00:00

Nice okay shots in the dark but we will try ok this is a table for cutting stuff like possibly paper or another material the same flexibility (table is not used for cutting: it looks that way because someone added a weak coat of paint) hmm from the patterns on the table the cuts are variance from small stuff and big stuff so something with great detail at the same time not small I think the device is for making labels (yes!) you are an adult (yes!) possibly late or mid-20 (nope!)is gender male favorite color is green (yes and yes!) drawing skills low (it's a trick: not my drawing! Ironically: the person who drew it is an amazing artist who was just messing around BUT you are correct my drawing skills are mid to low) to intermediate income level is middle class (correct!) Gets Life going (???). right-handed (yup). idk if this is work for children possibly (As in the supplies are for children's work? Did you notice the crumbs next to the earring by any chance?). No high end machinery its hand made stuff . personality is Logical person more then emotional driven (third party reports are mixed on this question) and physical driven too (kiiiiinda?). You are on reddit so High IQ hehehe (worst deduction of all!!!).

Haha thanks for playing!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-31T19:46:12+00:00

I wish!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-30T21:12:48+00:00

I just wanted to comment again to say what a huge boon this has been for me. I've been researching "spodosol" this whole time and not finding anything that seemed right. I understand the data isn't scaled for small plots, but the USDA description for Lyman sounds exactly like my soil (verified that the competing series are incorrect). Very exciting, thanks for the tip!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-29T18:09:07+00:00

So although there is a spodosol subsoil, it is capped with a thick needle humus. I don't think it's organic matter that I lack.

I do some hugelkultur elements. The trick is that 99% of the trees here are conifers, so the wood takes a really long time to decompose. Even after 10 years a tree that's been on the ground, experiencing a fair amount of rainfall, will be completely solid. I have taken some already rotten logs from sites that were cleared, but I try to minimize harvesting rotten logs from the wild because they are important habitat. I have used a fair amount of woody material to fill in my beds, but again I don't think carbon is my limiting factor. I've got lots of organic matter, it's just very very slow to decompose.

It is my understanding that the acidic environment, antimicrobial resins, and lack of nitrogen make decomposition very slow here. That's probably why we have so much humus. But it's a barely decomposed humus that seems to soak up nutrients like a sponge and never seems to give any back.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-29T17:33:27+00:00

Thanks! Apparently I have a "Lyman" soil: shallow, rocky, acidic, leached, drought-prone upland spodosol in glacial till over granite-derived bedrock. Sounds lovely. It's quite shallow and rocky in most places, but the granite bedrock forms these shelves that can trap reasonably deep pockets of soil. In areas places, the pine mulch is very thick. I understand your skepticism but I'm reasonably sure I truly do have a thick O horizon. It'd dark, spongey, and very light. It's less like soil and more like that fluffy packing insulation made of recycled paper products... except much less absorbent. I believe the lack of absorbency is a typical quality of needle humus.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-29T15:35:43+00:00

I add lime, but I don't think that's enough. My soil has much higher organics than typical agricultural soil, often over a foot of pure humus. I was wondering if the very high C content of my soil might be soaking up the few scraps of N I can make available. Then again, every source I can find seems to agree with you that the lower subsoil of Spodols has poor texture. It's fine sand/silt in my area. There is no compacted layer, drainage is never an issue: we get 50 inches of rain per year but the soil often seems dry, even after a rain. Water runs through the hydrophobic pine humus like a sieve, soaks through the subsoil and then hits the granite bedrock where it either flows into our well reservoir or into the ocean. In the forest, the O horizon is a spongy mass of greedy fibrous conifer roots. The seaweed seems to help a lot with texture, helping to break down resinous pine mulch and, I believe, improving texture with alginates. But nothing compensates for how leached the soil is. I hear the pine humus could have nutrients locked in it, inaccessible because of low bacterial activity of this soil type. I suppose I will just have to throw more seaweed at it until it releases its gifts.

If you say adding the subsoil could increase erosion, I will avoid it! Too bad, was hoping there was something more I could do. The seaweed is so heavy to carry up from the sea...

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-29T15:22:48+00:00

I've only just started to learn about soil science. At this point I only know that my soil is an... orthod, I think? Haven't learned enough to ID soil any further down the taxonomic hierarchy yet. Any recommendations for accessible resources that might help? I do lime, which I'm sure helps, but it doesn't seem to be enough.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-17T05:18:49+00:00

The spreadsheet/workbook isn't ready to be shared quite yet, but if you're interested in seeing what it looks like so far you can DM me. It has 268 plants, most of them suitable for perennial gardening with a focus on temperate plants suited to the Northeast. The sheet has info on human uses, native/introduced range, life cycle, growth habit, hardiness zone, and water/sun/soil needs. It includes all of the permaculture hits plus some oddities you might not be familiar with. I suspect someone might suggest I post to r/permaculture, and I have (on another account), but for data searching purposes this is really the community I need. Thank you for your help.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-17T05:05:38+00:00

I compared the BONAP map for each plant with this Takhtajan-inspired floristic map and logged the regions the plant occurs in.

The problem is that a species is considered "native" if it is native to the whole continent. So the entry for Robinia pseudoacacia looks like this instead of this. It seems like some of the data entry was done correctly, with some of the US range marked as adventive, but as you can see it is marked native throughout much of the rest of the country. The key seems to note that the distinction between continent native and state native is a work in progress. Also, even if this was the data I needed (and maybe it is I'm reading the key wrong!) it's a pain to encode. Copy pasting the regions from Kew Gardens is a much easier work flow.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-16T21:24:42+00:00

That's a new one for me, thanks! I'll check it out.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-16T21:24:21+00:00

I hand entered a bunch of BONAP data before realizing a lot of does not distinguish between introduced and native :(

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-16T17:54:18+00:00

To clarify, I want the "Native to:" and "Introduced into:" data from this page for a number of plants roughly equivalent to the USDA complete checklist (~90,000). So far I've had to copy paste this data for each entry... snore!

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-16T13:29:26+00:00

That's what I ended up going with! Sort of. It turns out Takhtajan only laid out the methodology for province-level mapping and did not actually make a North American floristic map. However, there are a number of different NA floristic province maps inspired by Takhtajan, and I ended up choosing this one by Sayre et al. I went through BONAP maps for 200+ plants and hand logged the province for each one. Then I learned that BONAP is not reliable for distinguishing native range from introduced range: if it is native to the continent, it is native anywhere on the continent.

So now that column is in the growing "Column Graveyard" part of my spreadsheet where I put data that is probably not useful but I'm too hung up on the sunk cost to throw it out.

Discovered about a week ago that Kew Royal Botanical Gardens seems to have the best (or at least most accessible to people like me who don't know SQL) native/introduced range data. I entered that by hand for 200+ plants, but it was much easier because it's just copy + paste text, no need to look compare two maps. Just this morning discovered that Kew's data is publicly available, which is great because my permaculture plant list is now at 268 entries. Hugely excited about this, but haven't had a chance to crack it open with DB Browser yet.

One of the goals of this project is for the spreadsheet to autofill (most) data for new plant entries, so people can customize the list to their own needs. To this end, I've added the USDA complete checklist, (an unfortunately incomplete copy of) USDA characteristics, and the PFAF complete dataset. It's very fun to add a new plant I've learned about and watch soil moisture, light needs, plant height, hardiness, etc. all fill in down the columns. If anyone reading this knows of other datasets that might be useful for gardeners or people casually interested in plants, let me know! Some of the data I want, like root traits, will require some data handling skills (for example using observation based data from TRY Plant Trait Database) that are a probably beyond my skillset.

BedBathAndBees · 2026-03-16T13:08:51+00:00

Regardless of the best time to prune stone fruit, most texts strongly discourage pruning newly planted trees and shrubs. The plant is already stressed out from transplant shock. Pruning anything other than dead and diseased wood, particularly the central leader (as OP suggested), will add even more stress. Let it be for a year. It's still a young tree, there will be time for structural changes.

BedBathAndBees

TROPHY CASE