Someone told me to pour cold leftover tea and coffee into the potted geraniums. So, is the caffeine supposed to give the plants more energy to grow flowers? I seem to remember hearing something about putting used tea leaves around under rose bushes, too… must look into this…
09/10/2005
Updated 28/11/2005:
Yes, so I finally checked this out with some organic rose growing folks, and it seems that tea leaves are, in fact, good for the rose bushs. So are coffee grounds. Both of these, apparently, give a big nitrogen boost to the shrubs and produce more green growth.
You can put tea bags and coffee grounds in the compost, of course, but they don’t need to be composted because they’ll break down quickly if you just spread them on the soil around the root zone of the roses. It would stand to reason that this would work for other plants too.
Next year, I think I’ll try this with the geraniums and other container-grown plants, which always end up looking a little yellow by the middle of the season if the original planting soil isn’t given another shot of fertilizer every couple of weeks.
Also — elsewhere in the garden — Environment Canada says that you can protect flower bulbs from cutworms by spreading tea leaves on the ground nearby! I don’t know for sure if cutworms attack doffodils, but still wish I’d known that information when I was out planting all those daffodils earlier this fall — you know, just to be on the safe side!…