At our home we eat a lot of eggs; Jim typically eats 6 egg whites every morning. That is a lot of eggs which results in a ton of egg shells. Up until a month ago we were throwing away all those egg shells.
But then we read about an easy way to use the egg shells in the garden as fertilizer and since we both love to garden we figured that we would give it a shot. Egg shells contain calcium and calcium is very helpful to plants, especially tomatoes. It helps to prevent blossom end rot. We are growing some tomatoes as well as peppers and onions in our veggie garden area. We are also growing a ton of flowers as well that could benefit from the egg shells. Soil contains various essential minerals, one of which is calcium. Calcium helps the plant’s cell walls which aid in keeping the plants upright and provides a way for other minerals to move through the plant. Think of adding calcium to the soil like giving your body a vitamin.
How to use egg shells in the garden as DIY free fertilizer
We started to rinse out and save all the egg shells.
Once we had a big bowl of them saved we pulled out our Ninja blender and packed the blender with shells. We turned the blender on medium speed and within seconds the container full of shells was reduced to a fine consistency of calcium rich goodness.
Any blender will work for this grinding process. We had to do 3 different sets to get all of our egg shells ground up (or is it ground down?).
The big bowl of shells you see above produced a small container of ground shells.
Once we had the shells ground we went outside and added some to the soil. We are using the Topsy Turvey Tomato Tree so we put the egg shell granules in the planter and then mixed it in with a hand hoe.
To distribute the remaining calcium rich fertilizer we put it on the soil in our other planters. Because the shells ground down to such a fine consistency they will quickly be absorbed into the soil. We’ve heard of people putting egg shells crushed by hand on soil but since those are much larger pieces they will take longer to be absorbed into the soil. We like the idea of using this finely ground consistency for a quicker and more direct pick me up for the soil.
As luck would have it, Mother Nature was on our side during this process. The night after we put down the calcium rich free fertilizer a powerful soaking rain came through the area. Perfect timing as this allowed the nutrients to begin their job to help the soil.
We’re pretty pleased with how easy this was to do and it was 100% free; easy and free make it a must do again. We’ve already started saving more egg shells to treat our other plants.
We’re also wondering if this would be a good idea for house plants?
How do you fertilize your outdoor plants?
