With every other frosty morning, when an invisible and treacherous layer of ice appears on the sidewalks, we solve the same question: How to get safely to the car or to the goal? The good news is that we can forget about table salt if we have enough completely natural material at home – coffee grounds.
Although road salt is quite a reliable helper, it is enough to look at ruined shoes, irritated dog paws or drying bushes along the paths, which the salt is slowly but surely consuming, to quickly change your intention to sprinkle the pavement with this material again.
What can coffee grounds do? Watch the YouTube video by Elli Staníková:
We have an ecological solution
Fortunately, there is another solution that is literally under our noses – ordinary coffee grounds, which can turn from worthless waste into the best friend of the owner of the house and garden.
All you have to do is throw the coffee grounds on the icy surface and you will be largely done with it. What is her magic?
Dark color is beneficial
It comes down to a few simple things, the most important of which are its color and texture. Thanks to its dark color, coffee acts as a magnet which creates a heat trace around the grains that breaks the ice, and at the same time, thanks to its rough surface, it immediately creates an effective anti-slip layer. Walking on such a sprinkled sidewalk is even safer and safer than walking on a layer of sand.
It does not harm – on the contrary, it will help the quality of the soil
The fundamental advantage that should convince us to use coffee grounds is the incredible friendliness of this material to the environment. When the last of the snow and ice melts in the spring, owners of road salt are often horrified to discover how many plants in the area have not survived. Salt penetrates deep into the ground, where it changes the chemical composition of the soil. Coffee logr is the exact opposite of salt – it does not damage the surrounding vegetation or negatively change the chemical composition of the soil, so plants continue to grow on such a plot without problems.
Natural fertilizer instead of harmful salt
We can say that sludge is essentially a natural fertilizer that contains nitrogen and other substances that plants love. Instead of worrying about ruining our garden, we can stay absolutely calm. The rest of the coffee will be washed into the lawn or among the flowers after the winter, where it will decompose over time, adding nutrients to the soil and thus benefiting gardens.
It’s the best way to go full circle and use material that would otherwise end up in landfill.
Caffeine for soil microorganisms
A lesser known but all the more interesting fact is how coffee grounds affect life underground even when everything seems dead. Perhaps some of us will be surprised that a certain amount of caffeine remains in coffee even after brewing. Residual caffeine in the sediment can stimulate soil microorganisms to activity even in the winter, thanks to which they start processing nutrients in the soil earlier and the garden thus gets a head start before spring. The soil along the paths will be ready to support new plants much sooner.
There are clear rules here
Even though we already know that it is coffee grounds that will do the best service not only on the garden path, we must also realize that there are certain rules that cannot be exceeded. Never spread wet, fresh sediment on the road, which would immediately freeze into dangerous clods in the cold; always let the material dry completely first. After all, you can prepare for such winter protection of your own health all year round.
