From what I remember a lot of the arguments with spent coffee was with acidification of the surrounding soil.

As for fungus you need to remember that bacteria and fungus play crucial roles in the life cycle in your soil. Healthy soil promotes healthy plants which in turn allows your plants withstand the onslaught of diseases. It is when your plants are sick that they become vulnerable fungus and other pests.

I am not sure if this was a clear answer.

Now we just argue about everything.

Coffee grounds dumped onto the soil surface are just another kind of organic debris. That the soil system will process and turn into humus.

What Dan said. At one stage or another, fungus is at work in the compost. Does fungus on coffee grounds do any harm? Well, I wouldn't eat it but I don't recall any fungus that breaks down dead plant debris causing harm. Especially given how fungi are specific about their hosts.

tj

Harm to the gardener? Or to the compost pile?

lazy_gardens ''Harm to the gardener? Or to the compost pile?''

Why are you trying to bracket me with those two categories?

Were there harm, and I doubt that unless one is allergic that there is harm, why could it not be to the gardener and/or the compost and/or something that hasn't even been considered yet?

Was the objection to the fungus purely aesthetic?

I think that last question has already been answered. To many people, fungi in the compost or soil are equated with harm to plants (and to a lesser extent it seems, people). I wouldn't say it's purely aesthetic, rather it's rooted in a misunderstanding of the role of fungi and their general harmlessness.

When people ask me if moldy/smelly/otherwise rotten stuff can go into the compost, I tell them sure, it's just got a head start.

Coffee grounds are slightly acidic (6.2 pH) about what properly made compost would be and in the range that most plants prefer (6.0 to 7.0 pH).

Just as there are good and bad bacteria there are good and bad fungi, most are either beneficial or innocuous and some form that mycorrhizal relationship with plants.

Some people, whose knowledge of science comes from the ads on tv, seem to think that all bacteria and fungi are bad and need to be eradicated.

True about science education from TV advertising. The anti-bacterialness of many products is something that vendors take great pride in. You need a bad-guy, ideally with an "ick" factor, and bacteria are convenient bad-guys with ickiness. It's not commonly understood that about half of the mass of a human body is actually (non-human) bacteria. Not as many fungi, but the human body biome still happily coexists with a dozen strains of fungi. So if you're going to be vengefully anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, you're not likely to be good company.

It's well understood that when you take antibiotic, you risk fungal infection, because the biome is disrupted. Increasingly, we're seeing successful probiotic, rather than antibiotic therapies. With regard to bacteria, fungi, and compost, just chill, folks. It'll do what it needs to do.

You don't have to put it in the trash and wait . You are allowed to put it directly on the ground at any time. My plants say me great thanks for doing it, because snails and slugs hate to walk over the coffee grounds surface which sticks to their gentle bodies. And any fungi or mold that occasionally grow over coffee on the soil never did any harm to nearby plants.

When I put my spent coffee grounds directly on a potted raspberry for about a year it didn't seem to help at all. No sign of the Nitrogen boost you would expect.

Someone here suggested that the stuff was allelopathic until composted, like black walnut.

Personally I think it's like mom said:. Coffee will stunt your growth.

Like most fads (and the backlash), the main takeaway is that the supposed benefits were way overstated - probably combined with fact that coffee shops started giving them away. Coffee grounds overall can make decent compost and easy to add to yard as a soil amendment, but there was almost magical thinking about how great the effects would be. To be fair, the complaints about fungus and whatnot were probably overdone as well, or came from people who expected it to be magically simple.

Worms love coffee grounds, more UCG =more worms, more worms= more humus + better soil structure

People tended to get excited about the fact that coffee grounds could be as low as 10:1 for C/N, and looked to them for a nitrogen jolt. Ain't true. The nitrogen in coffee grounds is tied up in proteins that require slow bacterial and fungal decomposition to release. Same as in any compost. Just dropping coffee grounds on a plant sure won't hit it with plant-usable nitrogen. Peanuts are 25% proteins, with correspondingly large amounts of nitrogen. But dropping peanut butter on a plant isn't going to do anything for that plant.

And yes, worms seem to like coffee grounds. But I suspect it's like the "sugar story", where you add sugar to a compost pile to breed bacteria. Yep, bacterial populations skyrocket, the sugar is consumed, and the bacteria then goes away. To the extent worms are attracted to eat coffee grounds doesn't mean those same worms will do a job on everything else.

I'm glad the 'fad' is almost over, it was getting expensive putting fresh coffee grounds in the garden. On the other hand, the worms were REALLY tunneling!

On a serious note... am I the only one who doesn't want to put flavored coffee grounds in the garden? I'm sure that if some government agency has approved them for human consumption they're safe... lol. To me, they taste 'chemically'. Are they approved for beneficial flora and fauna, I wonder?

Well, for one thing, MOST of the flavored oils are leached out in the brewing process, so what you're smelling is a tiny fraction of what was there. But no, they won't be 'approved' for flora and fauna. Generally, if a product is safe to eat, it is not considered a threat to the environment, except in special circumstances (spilling oil into a waterway, etc.). If it's safe for humans, the residue is generally considered safe to compost. In fact, the soil food web has so many different kinds of microbes that it's far more versatile than the human body in terms of what it can digest.

I think almond flavored collards might be nice. Ooh ooh, vanilla bean flavored beets! Of course, a chocolate flavored worm might be somewhat disgusting.

"If it's safe for humans, the residue is generally considered safe to compost."

Yeah, like I said, I wonder if it's safe for the GARDEN. I don't put UCG, nor food scraps for that matter, in the compost pile. To me, it's a waste of time and effort. I've got better things to do than build, turn, and otherwise maintain a compost pile. It all goes directly into the garden. It's called 'direct composting', or 'sheet composting'. Most times, it gets tossed under the mulch, but sometimes, right on the surface it goes. Any decomp that occurs in my garden is 'cold' - thus an entirely different group of flora and fauna.

My compost piles are wood chips with green leaves, grass clippings, and green leaves stripped from brush clearing around the property. No turning is done. As a pile gets enough finished material to be worth the effort, it is sifted and separated, Any larger material gets mixed in with green leaves and fresh grass clippings from the neighbor (I don't mow, I use a swing blade to make weed and grass hay which is used as mulch) to make a new pile.

I can't imagine it would be a risk to the garden either. The soil food web is very adaptable and will eat all kinds of stuff that we don't even touch. :-]

I'm sure you're right, I'm just nutty about what my worms eat. I don't even use paper and cardboard in the garden. Like the flavored coffee, I'm sure it's generally safe, I'm just nutty lol. Although... I'm sure kale with essence of imitation almond might be nice.