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Monday, May 6, 2019

Free Nutrients for My Vegetable Garden


This is about a dozen egg shells ground to a fine meal. Egg shells contain calcium, a mineral that some vegetables need to thrive and inhibit disease. As I use eggs, I rinse the shells and set them aside until I have about a dozen. They dry over the course of several days and then are easy to pulverize.*

When I have enough, I mash them quickly with a potato masher, then run them through the food processor until the particles are fine. Some of the particles are as fine as dust, so I let them settle for a few minutes before taking off the lid.

Finally, I stir a tablespoon into the soil where I'm transplanting a seedling, along with whatever else I'm adding at the time. In the case of this batch of eggshell meal, I also added epsom salts, as I was transplanting tomato seedlings. Epsom salts are an available source of magnesium, a nutrient that tomato plants need along with the calcium.

It's free. It benefits my vegetable production. And it does something useful with the eggshells.


*Damp eggshells don't pulverize into a meal very easily. If using freshly rinsed egg shells, it's best to dry them in a warm oven on a baking sheet for about 30 minutes, like right after you take baking out of the oven, and the oven is still hot to warm.

6 comments:

  1. I did this when I was gardening at our local community garden. It's a great free way to add minerals to soil. My plants loved it!

    - Tina

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Tina,
      Gotta love it when something so simple and free works so well!!

      Delete
  2. Never thought about pulverizing instead of just crushing the egg shells before, but that makes sense if your spreading/adding the shells in small amounts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi live and learn,
      from what I've read, breaking the shells down into finer particles makes the minerals more readily absorbed into the soil and then taken up by the plants.

      Delete
  3. We add eggshells to our garden to fend off slugs and snails. Never thought about turning it to powder to use as fertilizer. Thank you BTW for your informative post on freezing eggs. My husband was skeptical, but it worked. We have to watch our cholesterol intake, so must limit our egg consumption further.

    Yesterday, we were discussing diet with my husband's doctor, and we will be making some changes to our diet, especially reducing animal fats, red meats, processed meats and dairy. We'll be eating more beans, fish, and vegetables. Normally my husband cooks whatever he wants to eat, but now I'm going to have to be the bad cop and stop him.

    YHF

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi YHF,
      I'll be trying crushed eggshells to keep slugs at bay in the strawberries this year.
      I'm glad that freezing eggs has worked well for you, too.
      I hope that the new diet isn't too hard to accept. But think of all of the money that you'll be saving, with buying less red meat! Maybe you can use some of the savings to buy a couple of special "okay" food items to ease the pangs of deprivation. Best wishes with this.

      Delete

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