|
|
Garden soil and tilled farm fields can come in many colors and textures.
I personally find this to be a fun part of my landscaping. Yes, there are many commercial products available but personally I prefer to create these areas using unused coffee grounds. Yes, coffee grounds! Coffee grounds come in so many colors and textures. It’s funny but I got my inspiration for this idea from my daughters. I had some old packets of coffee from some gift baskets. While working on a summer scene my daughters started building our garden with these. They worked well. The difference in color and texture of decalf vs. standard coffee allowed us to vary the soil as we moved across the field. The coffee grounds gave us a very nice textured soil. But a feature we didn’t expect was how easy the grounds worked around our garden plants without staining them. They really looked like we had planted them. We was able to create grooves in the grounds to look like we had tilled the soil. The grounds are heavy enough to sit on the layout well but light enough to work easily around plants and trees.
I also found this to work well down around my barns, creeks, and areas where I wanted to show a change in nutrient content. By changing brands and blends, I could create areas that appeared to have heavy deposits of manure for feedlots. Down by my creeks I use lighter colored grounds to show the soil being drained of it’s nutrients.
Coffee grounds are generally low cost compared to comercial soil products. Grounds can be reused or discarded after each use. One downfall (or maybe advantage) to using coffee grounds is the aroma. Personally we liked the aroma over the smell of some of the comercial products. If the aroma is too strong simply set the can of grounds in a dry outdoor location for few days without the lid.
|
