Can You Use Eggshells In Your Garden (3 Top Benefits)
Eggs are a great source of protein and nutrients in many people’s diets. If you have backyard hens, you may find yourself eating eggs every day (and sometimes twice a day)! But what do you do with the leftover eggshells? A great way to repurpose eggshells is by using them in your garden to add key nutrients and calcium to the soil. They make for great feed and supplements for flower and vegetable gardens and help to create bountiful and healthy yields.
In this article, we will look at how to use eggshells in your garden, how often you should put them in the garden and the top 3 benefits of using eggshells in your garden.
Table Of Contents
- Can You Put Raw Eggs In Your Garden?
- How To Use Eggshells In Your Garden
- How Often Should You Put Eggshells In Your Garden
- Benefits Of Using Eggshells In Your Garden
Can You Put Raw Eggs In Your Garden?
Putting raw eggs in your garden is incredibly beneficial to your garden as it helps boost your soil’s nutrients by adding calcium and other key nutrients that assist with plant growth. In particular, crops such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants will benefit nicely from the added calcium.
When using eggshells, be sure to clean them out properly and that there is no residue of egg yolk or whites left in the shell. This step is important and should never be skipped to avoid the risk of bacteria, including salmonella.
How To Use Eggshells In Your Garden
There are two different ways we like to use eggshells in our garden, the first is what we will call the crushed eggshell method for the sake of keeping things organized in this article, and the second is by making eggshell water.
To do the crushed eggshell method, the first step is to clean off your eggshells, ensuring no egg whites or yolks are left in the shell (as mentioned above). Once dry, preheat the oven to 400°F and bake the eggshells on a baking sheet for approximately 10 minutes. This will kill off any other bacteria and salmonella. You’ll want to do this before placing the eggshells in your garden.
Once the shells are baked, they will be much easier to crush. The smaller the shell, the faster it will decompose. You can crush the shells into smaller pieces using a food processor or coffee grinder.
We like to store ours in a mason jar and add it to the garden when needed. Below, you can see our jar of lightly crushed shells. Before placing them in the garden, we will crush them into a smaller powder using a coffee grinder. We like to store them in larger pieces as we also feed them to our chickens.
The second method is to make eggshell water. This method is quite simple. Eggshell water can be made by pouring boiling water over eggshells and letting them sit overnight. The next day, strain the eggshells out of the water and pour the eggshell water into your garden.
This is a simple way to add calcium and water your garden at the same time. However, if you choose this method, you will still need to discard the shells afterwards. We only do this when we feed our chickens the crushed eggshells afterwards.
How Often Should You Put Eggshells In Your Garden
It can take several months to a full year before eggshells decompose in the soil, assuming they have been ground into small pieces. Larger pieces can take even longer. For this reason, it is best to add eggshells into the soil in the fall when you till your garden (to learn more about tilling your garden, check out our article “Should I Till My Garden In The Fall Or Spring?”. This will give your soil more time to settle and give the eggshells time to break down.
You can mix extra eggshells in the spring to provide calcium to your vegetables. This is particularly valuable to tomatoes, which need a lot of calcium. It is possible to add too many eggshells, which can increase the pH of your soil. This is only usually a problem for vegetables that prefer low-acidity soil.
3 Benefits Of Using Eggshells In Your Garden
There are benefits of adding eggshells to your garden that can help your vegetables flourish. Here are the top three.
1. Adds calcium to the soil
Eggshells are excellent ways to fertilize your garden as they are high in calcium carbonate, which has numerous benefits, including strengthening plants’ cell walls, preventing various diseases and protecting from heat stress. It also contains other nutrients that are beneficial to vegetables, such as magnesium, phosphorus and potassium.
2. Helps with pest control
Sprinkle eggshells around your vegetable plants to help prevent crawling bugs, such as slugs and cutworms, flea beetles and more, from attacking your crops. It does this by creating a bumpy and crunchy pathway to your vegetables, which deters crawling bugs away.
3. Discourages blossom-end rot
While eggshells do not prevent or treat blossom-end rot, they can help discourage it by adding calcium to the soil. Blossom-end rot is caused by a lack of calcium in the fruit, which can be due to low calcium in the soil. You can add eggshells to your soil or try adding eggshell water to help provide additional calcium.
