I found out that Steven King lives in Bangor, Maine. I grew up reading his books so I decided to cruise by his house:

His style of landscaping is mostly shrubs and trees and not too many flowers from the looks of it though maybe it was in the back where he keeps all the bodies:

The gate to his house was really cool, covered in bats, spiders and three-headed dragons:

I did manage to pick up 2 bottles of liquid Coast of Maine Salmon Fertilizer from Blue Seal Feed in Bangor, Maine. Maine accents aren’t terribly thick, however, I had originally thought it was called Lucille Feeds! I had called around and they were the only ones in the area to carry this product. I raced over and paid $9.99 US a bottle.

After getting back I tried contacting some of the distributors of Coast of Maine products to see if I could locate some of the concentrate. Some stores had carried it in the past and now only carried some of their other products like soils, soil conditioners and compost. One didn’t have inventory information and couldn’t tell me which of their locations may or may not sell the product. Another told me they didn’t stock it and gave me information on an alternate liquid seaweed blend fertilizer they carried. One brilliant person told me to contact Coast of Maine as he thought they had stopped producing it (not sure why it never occurred to me to call the company). I got this response from their customer service representative:

“Thank-you for contacting Coast of Maine Organic Products, Inc. Unfortunately we no longer market nor sell Salmon Plant Food. We do recommend contacting a company called Pharm Solutions. They have a product called Fish Pharm that is similar to the Salmon Plant Food. www.pharmsolutions.com.”

Noooo! After all my hard work and tentative hopefulness!

I have now resigned myself to the fact that I have the last two bottles of this stinky gold in the world.

A week ago I decided to amend the soil by top-dressing it with Nature’s Glory Tomato and All Vegetable Fertilizer, a 5-7-7 slow-release organic fertilizer:

It looks like little pellets and doesn’t smell. I spread it over the garden using a hand spreader and then watered the granules down onto the soil. I also sprinkled a little extra around the base of each tomato plant.

Yesterday, I heavily watered the garden, making sure that enough water had gotten down to the roots of the plants. Then I mixed up some Wegener’s Liquid Organic-based 8-6-6 Fertilizer in a 2 gallon watering can and watered that on to the garden.

It’s a brown slurry that is quite smelly. I’ll probably switch back and forth between these two organic fertilizers over the coming months. Hopefully these two additives will help my garden pop with growth.

Starbuck’s has a program called Grounds For Your Garden where they give free used coffee grounds to anyone who asks, to be used as a soil amendment. I decided to trek around to see how well this program worked and how much coffee grounds I could actually get.

I felt kind of weird about going into my favourite coffee shop and asking for their leftovers, however, when I went in to the Starbucks at Metcalfe and Slater the guy didn’t even miss a beat. He emptied out the espresso machines into a bin, pulled out the plastic bag and gave me about 6 lbs. of used coffee grinds. He said the best time to come by is after their morning and afternoon rushes. I’ve been back there a few times and have been “rewarded” with at least 6 lbs. of grounds each time.

I decided to check out other Starbucks shops to see if they give out their grounds. The staff at the Starbucks at the Lord Elgin Hotel gave me a funny look and said they just toss their coffee grinds in with their regular garbage (boo!). The staff at the Starbucks at Pinecrest Chapters told me that they had already given some grounds to a woman earlier in the evening, however, they gave me whatever they had left (yay!). The girl at the Starbucks in the Chapters at Blair and Ogilvie told me they don’t usually give them out and didn’t even have a bag to put them in but they could give it to me in a paper gift bag if I really wanted them (boo!).

So, it seems like not all Starbucks are towing the company line with their environmental initiatives. You’ll just have to check your local Starbucks to see who’s being environmentally friendly and who is not.

On a whim, I went to the Second Cup at Metcalfe and Slater and found out that they are not set up to collect used coffee grounds, however, they’ve had a few people asking for them and they are now considering setting up a system. Who knows, maybe someday even Tim Horton’s will consider this type of program.

Here’s one-day’s haul, about 30 lbs., from three different Starbuck’s locations.

Then I dump them into the bottom worm bin I’m no longer using (Long live the worms!).

Starbucks only gives away their used espresso coffee grinds that they dump out from the espresso machine. Some are broken down and some are still in a “puck” form.

Wear gloves, preferably ones you don’t care about, as spreading these grounds is a very pungent process. I like the smell of coffe, however, spreading this thinly over my lawn makes my hands, shoes and lawn smell like a venti quad ristretto espresso. I spread some last night while the grass was still wet from the rain. I’m still debating if that was the right move or not – if I had spread it when it was dry it would have settled into the thatch layers instead of sticking to the blades of grass. I think I should have waited.

If the coffee grinds are still sticking to the blades of grass, I might go around later tonight and spray it down into the thatch layer. Here you can kind of see it at a distance in the upper right-hand corner:

Q: Should I put down compost first and then put down corn gluten meal (CGM) to help cover up the 10-3-3 fertilizer that I’ve already put down?
A: I don’t need to put down compost to cover the 10-3-3 fertilizer before putting down the CGM. I would only put down compost in bare spots after having put down the CGM if I wanted to seed a small area.

Q: If coffee grounds have an NPK value of 4-1-3, won’t that interfere with the effects of the CGM?
A: The CGM won’t be affected by the coffee grounds. Coffee grounds are great for increasing the organic matter of your soil.

Q: How ineffective will the CGM be since I’ve already put down 10-3-3 organic fertilizer? Should I put down more CGM for this spring’s application?
A: The CGM won’t be as effective since I’ve already put down fertilizer, however, since the CGM is also a natural fertilizer in about a week I will notice that my lawn will explode with growing grass from all the nutrients that I’ve added.

Other things I learned:

• There’s no difference between powdered and pelletized corn gluten meal. People prefer the pelletized one so that the product doesn’t blow away.
• I had my lawn machine-core-aerated this weekend. I should now be putting down coffee grounds to fill up the holes and to increase the organic matter. I should also rake up the plugs or have a lumpy lawn. In about a year, after putting down CGM three times a year as well as coffee grounds on a daily basis, I won’t need to core-aerate my lawn as it will already have a lot of organic matter.
• I bought two 50′ irrigation (soaker) hoses and I will need to experiment in the evenings how much I should turn on the water. She suggested marking the “OFF” position on the tap, starting with a 1/4 turn in the evening and then checking the end of the lawn with a trowel in the morning. If the lawn has not been watered, I should increase the water by 1/4″ turns.
• I should also spread gypsum (calcium sulfate) near the road and driveway to offset the salt damage from snow plows in winter.

And, apparently, I’m in for a lot of mowing this spring.