Using eggshells in garden is one secret of experienced gardeners to grow plants with healthy fruits. Egg shells make awesome soil amendments products, so it’s a great idea to spray them on your plants or soil.
If you’d love to learn how to use eggshells, you have come to the right place. Read this article to learn different methods of using eggshells and how to prepare your eggshells for their use in the garden.
Contents
How To Prepare Eggshells for Your Garden in 6 Steps?
To prepare eggshells for your garden in six steps you must gather the eggshells, wash and dry them, bake and then grind them. Then you can either use the dry method or the wet method to apply it to your garden.
1. Gather the Eggshells
You need as many eggshells as you can get. Eggshells do not go bad quickly and they have a lot of uses in your garden. You can ask bakeries and restaurants for their eggshells.
If you choose to make use of only eggshells that you use in your kitchen, it might take you a lot of months to collect as many eggshells as you need. Remember to ask your family or people who you live with not to dispose of their eggshells.
2. Wash and Dry the Eggshells
Make sure that the eggshells are very clean. This step is very important, especially if you collected the eggshells outside and do not know how they were stored as eggs. After washing the eggshells, keep them in sunlight to dry them.
3. Bake the Eggshells
This is an optional option. Baking the eggshells before moving to the next step can make them release more nutrients. They will also be more effective in increasing the soil’s pH level. You can either bake them in an oven for a few minutes or keep them under the hot sun for some days.
Successfully baked eggshells will crumble quickly if you crush them with your fingers. Note that you do not need to bake eggshells if you want to use them to aerate the soil.
4. Grind the Eggshells
You can make use of a coffee grinder to grind the eggshells. However, you can also crush the eggshells with a mortar and pestle to grind them. Making a powder with eggshells will give you a very effective calcium fertilizer. Grinding the shells to be irregularly sized will give you a good product to boost soil aeration and drainage.
5. Sprinkle the Crushed Eggshells on the Soil (Dry Method)
You can make use of crushed eggshells just as you use coffee grounds. You can mix them into the soil or sprinkle them on the soil. Mixing them with the soil before planting is the most effective method because it prevents the wind from blowing them off the garden.
6. Make an Eggshell Liquid Fertilizer (Wet Method)
If you like, you can make a liquid calcium fertilizer with your eggshell powder. A day before you use the fertilizer, boil water and pour powdered eggshells in it when cool. Shake the mixture of water and powder eggshells and leave it for an entire night.
After 12 or more hours, you can shake the product and spray it on your soil and plants. This is a very cool way to make use of eggshells, as calcium is not mobile and relies on water to get to the roots of your plants.
How To Use Eggshells in Your Garden in 7 Easy Ways?
To use eggshells in your garden in seven easy ways you can use it to amend soil, grow healthier fruits, fill your compost pile and use them for seed starting. You can also use it to make the optimal soil for potted plants, help with drainage and repel pests.
7. Use It to Amend Soil
Eggshells can give your soil a calcium boost. Eggshells are free sources of calcium, unlike other calcium supplements that you will pay for.
Eggshells can also aerate the roots of your plants. If your garden crops get suffocated in the soil because of the lack of oxygen, adding eggshells can help. This means that you can use eggshells just like you use perlite.
One more use of eggshells is to slightly increase your soil pH. If your pH is too acidic, mix eggshells with the soil.
8. Use Them to Help Grow Healthier Fruits
Did you know that you can prevent blossom end rot when you use eggshells? Blossom end rot is the bursting of cells and tissues at the bottom of your fruits. You will see the end of the fruit rotting or turning brown or black. Some fruits that can have blossom end rot are tomatoes and cucumbers.
Calcium deficiency is the major cause of blossom end rot. If there isn’t enough calcium in the soil or your plants cannot collect the calcium that they need, they will produce sick fruits. This is why you need an optimal calcium concentration (and other nutrients) in your soil, especially when your plants are about to fruit.
You cannot treat blossom end rot with eggshells, but you can prevent it. Enrich the soil’s calcium level with eggshells some weeks before planting so that your plants can grow healthy fruits.
9. Use Eggshells to Fill Your Compost Pile
If you are looking for what to fill your compost pile with, make use of eggshells. Eggshells are not just used to fill the space in your pile of compost, they add calcium to the finished compost. This means that with eggshells in the pile, plants in your next growing season will grow healthy and produce healthy fruits.
Eggshells are also important in compost, as they are rich in carbon. Remember that compost needs higher levels of carbon (browns) than nitrogen (greens). With the presence of eggshells and other browns, fungi and other microbes can easily decompose nitrogen-rich products.
Asides from enriching the nutrition of your finished compost, eggshells can also help the finished compost aerate the soil. If other products in the pile decompose before the eggshells, the remaining eggshells can act like perlite in the soil.
10. Use Eggshells for Seed Starting
If you are a fan of creativity, consider using your eggshells as seed starters. Just like nursery trays, seed or plant starters are containers that you plant seeds in and use to nurse seeds until they are ready for transplanting.
Eggshells make very good plant starters, as you can easily remove the seedlings when ready for transplanting. If you like, you may choose to plant both the seedlings and their pods (i.e., eggshells) in the soil.
Just make sure that the shell has some cracks or holes that can help the seedling roots grow into the soil in which the eggshell is planted. This means that the eggshell can serve as a plant starter and slow-release calcium fertilizer.
11. Making the Optimal Soil for Potted Plants
Do you want to grow potted plants? One challenge that you may face is that potted plants cannot grow in regular soil, so you must amend the soil first or buy potting mix from gardening soil. The reason why potted plants cannot grow in regular soil is that they need aerated roots but soil may be too compacted in pots.
To fix this, many gardeners add perlite and other products to the soil so that their potted plants can have a steady supply of oxygen in the roots. If you have eggshells, you can make use of them to amend your soil so that you can use the soil for your potted plants.
With eggshells in the potted soil or potting mix, you can add little to no perlite. However, remember to regularly check the soil, as eggshells decompose while perlite doesn’t.
12. Improve Water Drainage for Potted Plants
Soil with good aeration drains water quickly. It does not matter the type of gardening plant that you want to grow, you will most likely need soil that does not hold a lot of water for long. Eggshells in potted plants are important as most plants in pots die due to poor water drainage.
While amending the soil with eggshells can help improve soil aeration and water drainage, you can take the use of eggshells a step further. Pour some eggshells into the pot before adding soil. The eggshells will act as a barrier between the soil and the bottom of the pot. This barrier helps water to drain off the pot quickly.
13. Pest Control With Eggshells
Of course, you can make use of eggshells to repel slugs, snails, and other pests. However, note that you cannot rely solely on eggshells to repel these pests. When using eggshells for garden pests, mix the shells with other pest-repelling products to make them more effective.
Contrary to popular belief, eggshells are not too sharp to make snails and slugs uncomfortable. However, snails and slugs prefer moving on moist surfaces and eating soft foods. Eggshells are neither moist nor soft, so these pests will prefer parts of your garden without eggshells to parts of the garden with eggshells.
Frequently Asked Questions
– What Are the Cons of Using Eggshells in the Garden?
Some of the cons of using eggshells in the garden are exposing your plants to pesticides and feeding plants with eggshells that have no nutrients. There’s also the possibility of attracting a lot of fungi and other microbes to your garden.
- Exposure of plants to pesticides: If you do not know how the eggshells in your possession were stored, wash them properly. Washing them will help you eliminate the chance of exposing your plants to toxic chemicals.
- Availability of nutrients: If you do not grind the eggshells to make a powder, they will release their nutrients very slowly. The size of the egg shells determines how quickly your plants get their needed calcium.
- Attracting fungi: As in the case of coffee grounds, pouring too many powdered eggshells on the same spot can attract fungi. Sprinkle the shells uniformly across the soil.
– Can You Spray Powdered Eggshell on Soil With Acid-loving Plants?
No, you cannot spray powdered eggshell on soil with acid-loving plants. Eggshells can alter the pH of the soil by making it alkaline, therefore unsuitable for acid-loving plants. If you’d love to use eggshells for the soil, you will most likely amend the soil with other products.
When you use eggshells in the garden, you will notice a slight rise in the soil’s pH level. Two weeks after using the egg shells, the pH level will become stable. By then, you can decide if the soil is still in the right pH range for your acid-loving plants.
However, if the pH level is still above the required pH of your plants, you can use vinegar or any pH-down product. Never forget about the pH needs of your plants.
Conclusion
Eggshells are truly super products and you should use them in your garden. Before you start with the eggshell magic, remember these points from the article:
- You can either crush the eggshells completely to release their nutrients or partially to repel some pests.
- To successfully deter pests, you cannot rely solely on eggshells.
- To use eggshells in your garden soil, sprinkle them some weeks before planting for the best planting experience.
- When using eggshells in your potting soil, do not grind them into powder.
- Remember that eggshells can alter pH, so always consider the pH requirements of your plants.
Now, you are ready to get creative with your eggshells in the garden, right? Don’t forget to use only non-toxic eggshells.
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