Singleton Environmental Centre demonstrates how to reuse your wood ash over Christmas

Singleton Environmental Centre in Ashford are offering free recycled coffee grounds and ash for customers to use on their gardens.

Residents are using the recycled ingredients from the centre’s café as fertiliser, or mixed in with compost to give their prized plants an extra boost.

Centre Manager, John Alexander, said:

“The ash and coffee grounds are put into the soil to help gardens and allotments be ‘nutritionally strong’.”

A member of the Ashford Residents’ Group of Facebook invited others to take advantage of the freebies:

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But what makes these ingredients so nutritional for the earth?

Wood ash compost can be a valuable source of lime, potassium and other trace elements which plants thrive on. Coffee grounds are also known for their neutral PH, meaning that they will fertilise the soil, without affecting its acidic levels.

You can also protect your Christmas vegetables from pesky slugs and snails, as sprinkling both firewood ash and coffee grounds over soil also acts as a natural repellent.

Carrots benefit from old coffee grounds too, so before you plant them consider mixing them with your recycled grounds to give them a growing boost.

Alexander discussed the Environmental Centre’s initiative. He said:

“Being an Environment Centre everything we do revolves around our ethos of re-use, recycle, low carbon footprint and being sustainable.”

Wood ash can also be recycled and used as a natural de-icer which will help to melt ice in an eco-friendly way, posing less risk to animals and nature.

You can also use fireplace ash as a natural ingredient to create traction on ice, to make it easier to walk on – perfect for the icy winter months. Using the ash as a de-icer can darken the icy patch, which will hold more of the sun’s heat and therefore melt quicker.

The Singleton Environmental Centre is open 9am-5pm Mondays – Fridays and 10am-4pm on Sundays. 

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