Tomatoes and strawberries are fruits that evoke thoughts of summer sun and you can maximise any potential harvest by making sure to properly fertilise them.
Knowing how to fertilise your tomatoes and strawberries will ensure they grow strong and healthy and provide you with a veritable bounty of delicious juicy fruits in summer.
Aside from chemical-store-bought fertilisers, gardeners can use coffee grounds to aid in their growth.
According to gardeners Jim and Mary Competti of This Is My Garden blog, one of the “easiest and best ways” to make your tomatoes “bigger and better harvest than ever this year” is to use coffee grounds.
They explained: “Coffee grounds have all kinds of uses when it comes to improving soil and helping plants grow.
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“But as beneficial as spent grounds can be, it’s perhaps with the beloved tomato plant where they truly take their powers to the next level.”
So why are coffee grounds so special for tomato plants? It turns out that leftover grounds have “two key attributes” that are “extremely beneficial” for both tomato seedlings and adult tomato plants.
Used coffee grounds “contain three essential nutrients that tomato plants love” - nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium.
What’s more, those nutrients happen to be in a form that when used in the soil around plants, can be “absorbed quickly” into the roots of a tomato plant.
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Spent coffee grounds also have the ability to “retain a tremendous amount of moisture” to make them bigger and juicer.
To use coffee grounds on tomato plants, when planting, mix in three to four tablespoons of coffee grounds into the soil in each planting hole. The grounds will blend with the soil to help it absorb and hold more moisture around the roots.
Coffee grounds can also be an “absolutely good fertiliser” for acid-loving plants like strawberries too, claimed gardening enthusiast Nicole Metzger.
She claimed that coffee grounds are a natural fertiliser and “could be the best fertiliser option for strawberries if used properly”.
There are a few ways you can use coffee grounds as fertiliser for strawberries. First, is by directly sprinkling the coffee grounds around the base of the plant. Once watered in, the nutrients will soak into the soil and fertilise the strawberry plants.
This works well because strawberry plants have shallow roots and the coffee grounds can easily reach the root systems to be absorbed by the plants.
Another way to use coffee grounds to fertilise your strawberry plants is to mix them into the garden soil before planting, or in a container, like a flower pot. Mix the coffee grounds in with the soil at about - a ratio of one to four.
A third way to use coffee grounds as fertiliser for strawberries is to mix the grounds into water. Letting the grounds soak in the water for a day or two will create a “wonderful, nutrient-rich liquid fertiliser for your strawberry patch”.
Mix about half a cup of coffee grounds into a gallon of water and allow to soak 24 to 48 hours, mixing occasionally. This will allow the nutrients to disperse throughout the water, creating an all-natural liquid fertiliser.
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