A: It won’t hurt, or help, in low amounts like that. One to two cups of grounds a day isn’t enough to affect the soil’s pH that quickly. While coffee grounds are high in nirtorgen, they’d be more effective as an ingredient in compost.

Same with eggshells. To effectively be taken up as nutrients by a plant, they’d need to be finely ground and worked into the soil.

It is easy to start a compost pile using kitchen scraps, grass clippings (free of chemicals), and coffee grounds, which are all ‘green’ materials, high in nitrogen.

Also needed are ‘brown’ materials: carbon-rich materials, like papers, cardboard, dead leaves, twigs, wood chips, straw and even wine corks! Brown materials should double the green materials in the pile. Break items down into smaller pieces for quicker decomposition.

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