When to give eggshells to plants?
Instead of considering them food waste, rethink those cracked shells and use them to help with calcium deficiency in the soil. Even in winter months, you can collect egg shells for use as a soil amendment in the springtime, utilizing their high calcium content to improve your garden. Don’t throw away eggshells! In your garden, they enrich soil with calcium, stop tomatoes from rotting, and keep slugs out. Crushed shells loosen compact soil, feed compost, and help seeds sprout.Other crop plants to prioritise with a dose of egg shells include potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, courgettes, marrows and squash. Avoid adding egg shells in quantity to lime-hating (acid-loving plants) which include blueberries, rhododendrons, pieris and azaleas.
Which plants benefit the most from eggshells?
As a plant food, egg shells are therefore perfect for lime-loving plants such as brassicas, but are best avoided as a food for acid-loving plants, such as rhododendrons. The simplest way to use egg shells to benefit plants is by composting, adding the shells to garden and kitchen waste in a compost bin. Eggshells are nutrient-rich and can be used in gardening as fertilizers, pest repellents, and compost enhancers. They can also aid in cleaning, serve as a calcium supplement, and be added to pet food for health benefits.Eggshells are often such a small percentage of the whole, that rarely are they able to overwhelm a batch of compost. Overall, after the composting process is finished and cured, most pathogens will be brought to a similar level as the surrounding soil thus reducing the amount of salmonella bacteria in your compost.Because eggshells can be composted, there’s no need to ever toss your used eggshells into the trash can. Instead, you can crush up your eggshells and add them to your compost pile. As a bonus, adding eggshells to your garden’s soil will help to keep pests like snails, slugs, cutworms, and cats away.