Friday, September 2, 2011

Egg Shells

I have heard of many things that you can put into your garden to add nutrients and help improve the soil and one of the things people say is to crush up eggshells and sprinkle them in.  Okay.  I tried that.  The problem is not in the eggshells themselves so much as the membrane that remains stuck to them and refuses to let the eggshell completely break apart. 

My wonderful mother-in-law taught me the trick to this problem.  I gather my eggshells in an oven safe bowl and after I bake something that I am making anyway (like zuchini bread from the 12 cups of zuchini that I pureed yesterday), I turn off the oven and stick the eggshells and bowl right on the rack.  The eggshells "bake" which makes them MUCH easier to crush.  I put them in a plastic baggie and let the kids go at them with one of their plastic toy hammers.  They have a blast (though too vigorous pounding can poke a hole in the baggie and then you have another mess to take care of.)  I sprinkle them in the garden around my plants and I have also found that the sharp little pieces of eggshell are a great deterent to slugs.  They seem to leave the plants alone where I have applied the crushed shells. 

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