How to Use Eggshells to Improve Your Garden
Eggshells provide numerous benefits for your garden. They give your plants a nutritional boost, deter pests, and increase the soil’s pH. Here is everything you need to know about the benefits of eggshells, as well as how to use them in your garden.
Did you know that plants benefit from the addition of eggshells? Using eggshells in your garden can improve your plants’ growing conditions as well as give them a nutritional boost.
Whether you have an outdoor vegetable garden or you’re growing lots of indoor plants, you should hang onto eggshells and use them to help your plants thrive. Here is everything you need to know about using eggshells in your garden as well as a few tips to get started.
There are three major benefits that eggshells provide. Eggshells provide plants with nutrients, deter certain pests, and increase the soil’s pH. Below is more information about these amazing benefits.
Eggshells primarily contain calcium carbonate, which is a mineral that plants need for healthy growth. This calcium helps strengthen the cell walls of the plants, just like it helps strengthen bones in humans and animals.
The shells also contain small amounts of phosphorus and potassium. Phosphorus helps plants form new roots, seeds, flowers, and fruit. Potassium strengthens the stems and helps the plant to grow.
If your garden is overrun with snails and slugs, you can use crumbled-up eggshells to keep them off your prized plants. These pests are not able to crawl over the shells because of their sharp, brittle nature. Any snail or slug that tries to crawl over these eggshells will get wounded easily.
To keep slugs and snails at bay, just spread the shells around the base of your plants on top of the soil. Use the shells to create a barrier that’s around 2 inches (~5 cm) wide for best results.
Another benefit of using eggshells in the garden is that the calcium helps raise the soil’s pH. It’s very similar to adding lime to make your soil more alkaline. Many plants have a hard time growing in acidic soil, so eggshells can help balance the pH for better growing conditions.
However, if you don’t want your eggshells changing the pH of the soil, then you can mix crushed eggshells with coffee grounds before adding them to their garden. The acidity of the coffee grounds will counteract the alkalinity of the eggshells.
Most plants will benefit from the addition of extra calcium, potassium, and phosphorus. However, certain plant varieties benefit more. These include fruiting vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. This is because the extra calcium helps to prevent blossom end rot.
Calcium-rich vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, swiss chard, and cauliflowers will also happily take up the extra calcium that you provide with the eggshells.
Now that you know the benefits of adding eggshells to your garden, it’s time to put them to work. Here are few ways you can utilize eggshells to improve your plants’ health and growth.
Just as you add all your veggie scraps and your grass clippings to your compost, you should add your eggshells as well. The minerals in the shells will break down and add valuable nutrients into the compost as it’s brewing.
You can just throw them straight in, but they do take a little time to break down. Therefore, if you have fast brewing compost, you might need to crumble or grind them up first.
The best way for your plants and soil to reap the benefits of eggshells and is by placing them directly into your planting holes. This will give your plants direct access to the eggshells, as well as all of their benefits.
Just make sure to crumble the eggshells before placing them in the soil. This helps them break down faster so your soil and plants can utilize the nutrients as soon as possible.
You can give all your indoor plants a healthy boost by making eggshell tea. Here’s how:
If your plants haven’t been repotted for a while, you should see them looking much better after you’ve applied this eggshell tea.
As you now know, eggshells break down over time and add goodness to the soil. But their total breakdown can take quite some time. Therefore, they are ideal to use as seed starter “pots.”
Here’s a quick way to use your eggshells as seed starters:
Once the seeds have germinated, and the little seedlings are large enough, you can plant them straight into your garden still in the shell.
Now that you know about the benefits of eggshells, it would be wasteful not to use them in your garden! Follow any of the suggestions above to give your plants a nutritional boost and improve their growing conditions.