Al, thank you for your response. I'll skip on the coffee ground idea for the containers. Since it's not just full sun, but full Texas sun and reflected heat from the house that can easily reach 120 during the hot part of the summer, I'm growing mostly drought tolerant plants. It includes Dianthus, African daisy, lavendar, Alyssum, spotted Nettle, a Begonia, Lobelia, Georgia Blue Speedwell, Verbena, and Coreopsis. A few plants were just too pretty to pass up, but I tried to stick with mostly drought tolerant varieties. I do have a couple of fish ponds nearby, so I have an abundance of string algae, pond scum, & fish-poo fortified water. And I just found a box of miracle grow in the garage. I'm used to gardening in our horrid clay soil, but new to containers, and simply don't know what special treatment they need.

You're talking about putting that stuff in a compost pile and putting the finished compost on your plants, right? I put that stuff in my compost all the time. I put the coffee grounds in with their paper filters. I put paper tea bags in intact -- string and paper tags too. I cut the plastic mesh tea bags open and discard the plastic. There are things you could dig directly into the ground around plants like banana peels, but, for the most part, better to let it decompose first. And when you put stuff around your plants, make sure to keep it 1 1/2" away from the stems to avoid stem rot. I've also used coffee grounds as a mulch but just for acid-loving plants like azaleas.

I don't have a huge amount of ash, maybe two or three gallons. My budget is tiny so I'm going with freebies for my garden as much as possible; don't have free lime but I did have some limbs left over from leaf scavenging, and fire. I'm largely composting in place as well. Adding the stuff to the soil without adding it to the compost would be rather tricky. But I'm skipping the place we've got active plants growing. Will probably put a little bit there after we cut it down for winter and before loading that spot up with OM.

Kimmsr writes,"I have not seen a problem with the coffee grounds repeling rain." I have, but then again in the past, and soon in the future again, I was and will be dealing with over 200 lbs of UCGs per week and not just a few filters-full per day. We have to make it clear that the concept of UCGs repelling water or rain is relative to 1-the amount used and 2-whether they are wet or dry. The more used, especially in terms of thickness, and the drier the UCGs, the more likely they are to repel water. This past week, I filled a wheelbarrow with shredded leaves and on top dumped 1/2 a 5 gallon buckets of dry UCGs. I was interrupted from mixing and wetting this mix together to create some mulch for the gardens and could only return 24 hours later. During that time we had an inch of rain and when I returned the rain had simply rolled off the UCGs and had gone to the bottom of the wheelbarrow. The UCGs were as dry as a bone. A couple of years ago I also tried to mulch a hosta garden bed using only UCGs. I placed it 2 inches thick. There was no rain for a few days and the UCGs dried up and a few weeks later I noticed the hostas were failing. I mixed the UCGs into the soil and began watering until all was moist and the hostas began growing properly. The grounds had crusted after the few dry days and they were repelling water from the ground and the plant roots. UCGs and shredded leaves have been my main source of amendments in the gardens since 2002.