Eggshells, Uses for

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Eggshells, Uses for

Sr. Gloriamarie Amalfitano wrote:
> . . . . I realized I had been thinking in terms of having enough veggie bits,
> egg shells etc to fertilize all my plants at once and just how dumb was that!!!

Well, actually, I don't know what "enough" would be, in your circumstances with container plants-- putting your plants down into a full pot of raw undigested organic matter would be "too much"! ;^)

you can crush a couple of eggshells in your hand, and drop the bits right onto the soil surface, maybe scratch a little soil over them to cover if you're fastidious. The begonia in my kitchen window has a _mulch_ of crushed eggshell.

You could spin a couple of tablespoons of veg trimmings in the blender with a half-cup of water, and water one dry plant with it, etc.

I wouldn't bother trying to save up any amount in the blender bowl. One thing about the eggshells, you could crush them into your watering pot, cover with water, add a squirt of vinegar, and let them soak overnight: then they wouldn't stink so badly as soaking a lot for a long time in water, and the vinegar would accelerate the process of turning the shells into soluble nutrients usable by the plants--as long as the acetic acid is gone when you water, it wouldn't be too acid for anything, and it's gone when you don't smell vinegar any more--same process as making your soup stock calcium-rich with calcium leached from the bones you use.

It's an interesting thing to do once (not for fertilizing plants, unless maybe tomatoes) to submerge a whole raw egg in vinegar in a glass overnight. In the morning the shell is entirely gone into the vinegar, and you have something that looks like a giant amoeba--a shell-less egg, contained only by the very fragile protein membrane inside the shell. After you've wondered at it and played with it a while, go ahead and lay it in the frying pan and pierce the membrane, cook and eat it.

--
Love in Christ,
Sibyl Smirl

Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2006
From: Sibyl Smirl
To: Anglican@stsams.org
Subject: Re: Taking Sibyl's advice and Green Thumb Attack