Every morning you wake up and drink your cup of joe with the coffee beans you keep in the cabinets. However, this isn’t the only use for coffee, and when you look into it, you will find that there are plenty of uses for coffee grounds, and if you look a little further, you can find the right one for you.

1. Help Your Garden Grow

If you’re interested in growing your own food or cultivating your own garden, you might be disappointed to find that the soil outside your house may be lackluster when it comes to the components that it needs to thrive. As plants grow, they will absorb the nutrients from the soil, meaning it may need to be replenished even if it has all the nutrients it needs to start with.

Believe it or not, coffee grounds have many nutrients that your soil needs. These include calcium, nitrogen, potassium, iron, magnesium, chromium, and phosphorus. On the other hand, coffee grounds can also help to absorb heavy metal that can damage your plants and contaminate soil.

2. Repel Insects

You can use coffee to repel insects in your home, because there are certain compounds in coffee that help keep insects away. In particular, compounds such as caffeine and diterpenes are toxic to insects. They are particularly effective against insects such as fruit flies, mosquitos, and beetles.

To use coffee in this way, you will need fresh coffee grounds. For repelling insects, you can follow two methods. For one, you can set out bowls of coffee grounds. Alternatively, you can scatter the grounds around outdoor seating areas and your garden to keep pests out.

3. Use Coffee Grounds in Your Hair

It might sound ridiculous, but one place you can use coffee grounds in your home is in the shower. In fact, the best place to use them is when you want to wash your hair. Simply massage your scalp with your ground coffee beans to exfoliate your scalp.

The reason you want to do this is that we put a lot of product in our hair on a daily basis. This can be very damaging to your hair and scalp, and sometimes shampoo isn’t enough to get all the product out. It’s important to use the coffee grounds before shampoo so that you get all the grounds out of your hair when you’re done.

4. Coffee Candles

Another thing you can use coffee for is to make your home smell good. After all, who doesn’t love the smell of coffee in the morning? The easiest method in doing this is to get a bowl of coffee beans and set a tea light on top of them. As the candle heats up, the beans will heat up and smell nice.

You can also make an air freshener if you can’t use a candle in your home or you don’t want to. All you need to do for this is to create a pouch for the coffee beans and tie it shut.

5. Protect Your Garden

We already looked at the fact that you can use coffee to keep insects away. So, if you want to keep your garden free of pests, you should try sprinkling your garden with coffee.

It isn’t just insects, though. In addition, certain pets such as cats don’t like the smell of coffee. So, if you want to prevent your pets out of your garden or even neighborhood cats, you will want to sprinkle some coffee in your garden to keep them out.

6. Scrub Your Dishes

How often have you come across a dish that took a little extra elbow grease to get clean? How about a pesky drip pan that needs a little extra scrubbing? For this, you might want to use ground coffee beans to scrub.

For one, coffee grounds are rough, meaning you will have better leverage to scrub residue off of your dishes. In addition, coffee grounds are slightly acidic, meaning that they will help break down residue on dishes as well. For the best results, you can mix the coffee grounds with a little soap and water.

7. Help Smelly Shoes

Smelly shoes can be a nuisance, and they can be a hard to avoid. Whether you are dealing with shoes that you wear everyday or a pair of old gym shoes, you can help handle the smell with coffee beans. This is for two reasons. The first is that coffee smells nice, but the bigger reason is that coffee absorbs smells.

8. Clean the Fireplace

Finally, you can use coffee grounds when you clean your fireplace. If you sprinkle coffee grounds in the fireplace before you clean the ashes, you will have less of a problem with air pollution and ashes flying through the air in your home.