coffee as foliar feed

Does anyone have any information of using coffee as a foliar feed? I can hardly find anything online, and the results seem to be mixed. Thanks ahead of time.

I am not a big fan of Foliar feeding, most of the time it is done at the wrong time of day and so ends up burning the leaves. It has been my personal experience that well prepared, properly nourished soil does quite well for my plants.

If you want to foliar feed; Steep 2 cups of grounds in a 5 gallon bucket, for 6 - 12 hours. Use to water and foliar feed your plants. The benefits of foliar feeding are the subject of much debate, but as always, let your plants be your guide. If they do not appear to be doing well after feeding, stop feeding.

Making a liquid fertilizer from steeping the used grounds is not quite the same as using left over coffee to water your plants. Left over coffee is more acidic and has other compounds in it that are removed from the grounds. Some acid loving plants enjoy the occasional watering with coffee, but they take their coffee black.

Try one plant and see what happens, that's what I do. I have never tried coffee but I have done tea and noticed a stronger plant, sun tea, the coreopsis turned into a bush. I need to start doing experiments like that again, since we've had kids it's harder to do stuff like that and remember what your doing.

Unlike Bryant, I am a fan of foliar feeding. But I have never done it with coffee. Sounds Acidic. I don't think I will ever try it with straight coffee. As far as I'm concerned brewed coffee is for me and not my plants.

Let worms or nature make it into something even better. Fertility requires time and energy, and I'll be damned if give away any of mine.

I'm curious to know if anybody ended up trying coffee foliar spray (or any liquid caffeine such as tea) and if so what were the results?

Plants make caffeine as a natural insecticide and it seems that it is also deadly for slugs and snails at 1-2%, which is about the amount in coffee. However, it may also be bad for many plants as caffeine seems to be allelopathic and may cause leaf burn? Caffeine also can be anti fungal and antibacterial, I wonder if that would be bad for soils or good bacteria?

In general, if I could get a good-bacterial foliar spray that I could trust, I would use that. I'm not sure if that would help my situation.

I have a big snail and slug problem. Older plants get along okay, but for herbs and baby plants, I'm searching for a solution that doesn't require transplanting. I would like to plant in place in the garden, but those babies are no match for the army of slugs! Manual stomping has been insufficient.

Caffeine also is harmful to ducks, but I have no data on how much it would take to harm ducks. I would like to have ducks in the future, but I am usually travelling for about three months each year, which makes animal systems hard for me at this time. Hopefully it would wash off long before duck time.

If caffeine foliar spray is useful, leftovers from the day's brew could be sprayed occasionally on the babies.

So: anybody tried it?

Kay Gelfling wrote:I have a big snail and slug problem. Older plants get along okay, but for herbs and baby plants, I'm searching for a solution that doesn't require transplanting. I would like to plant in place in the garden, but those babies are no match for the army of slugs! Manual stomping has been insufficient.

Have you tried using salt or Epsom salts for your slug problem?

These to methods are what I have heard all my life.

Putting salt directly on slugs will melt them.

Epsom salts are also beneficial to use in your garden:

https://journalnow.com/slugs-easily-controlled-with-cheap-diy-methods/article_85f6f2ae-77ae-588e-a225-1b36dc95e39c.html

https://www.hgtv.com/outdoors/flowers-and-plants/epsom-salts-for-plants

Kay Gelfling wrote:I'm curious to know if anybody ended up trying coffee foliar spray (or any liquid caffeine such as tea) and if so what were the results?

I haven't done it in a while (since my comfrey got rolling) but in the past I was fermenting grounds for a week or two, straining, and spraying as a foliar feed. worked well, but i am always spraying something on my plants (bokashi leachate, swamp water tea, garlic soap, etc).
I took a bunch of grounds in water in a bottle, let them ferment (remember to burp the bottle), took maybe a week or two. strained and watered down. spray at night (I have lots  of snails and slugs). it smells nasty, but not as nasty as some of the other stuff i use in the garden....

That's fascinating! Thank you very much for your responses!

Were the grounds you used leftover from coffee making, and may have had a reduction in caffeine, or were they fresh ground beans?

I'll have to read up on Epson salts for my soil type. They seem so salty! But they might be fine!

they were used grounds from my husband's business, i don't have the money to use fresh ground beans in the garden, lol, that's like "dude's got a yacht" kind of level..... plus it's a fermented thing, the stinkier and more rotten the better.
I find that honestly with foliar sprays it doesn't make much of a difference what i use- if you use something organic you'll be spraying regularly and just your presence out there seems to help. maybe changing the ph is also useful. i don't have a huge amount of confidence in the caffeine as pest control thing. it might work against one single pest. you seem to be in hawaii, i'm in brazil, we have coffee here, and it (and tea, and yerba mate) all have pests that attack leaves. But i'm also a major grouch, so ymmv. I do think that making my plants stronger with the feeds probably does more than spraying against things.

I do have serious slug/snail problems and the best thing i've done is set traps (boards, cabbage leaves, orange skins) and then go hunting at night every so often. i've tried so much and that seems to be the only thing that puts a dent in it.
You may enjoy posts by another farmer in Hawaii (i know it's big and have no idea where you both actually are) named Su Ba who posts here. They deal with a lot of pest issues and are super detailed in sharing what they do.

Thank you! I will check that out!

I have had some luck cutting a plastic bottle  and putting it narrow side in the ground with the seedling in the center. This has saved many a ravaged seedlings.