Keeping Your Plants Healthier With Hard Boiled Egg Water

[BantamoftheOpera]

http://lifehacker.com/5849170/keep-your-plants-healthier-with-hard+boiled-egg-water

Have any of you used this method? How does it work? Just curios

 

[CrazyCatNChickenLady]

I think this is very interesting.. Do they really lose that much calcium in the water though? Most of my shells get fed back to the chickens, or blown out.. so I really dont have that much to work with!

 

[Carolyn]

I usually put water in any container where I have mixed eggs up or drop fresh egg shells into a water container (I also do this with the empty milk containers.) I use this to water house plants and they seem to like it.
Egg shells are a gardners friend. While my friends and family often complain about problems with blossom end rot on tomatoes it is rarely a problem at my house anymore. I always repurpose my egg shells. Before I had chickens they went in the compost pile. I no longer compost myself; my chickens do it for me. All kitchen waste, leaves, garden debri and certainly all egg shells go to the chicken yard. The chickens love the treats, take care of the turning and add the fertilize. This wonderful black soil is returned to my garden each spring. The manure cleaned out of the chicken house is aged before I use it in the garden but the actual compost from the yard doesn't ever burn the plants.

You can dry your egg shells, crush finely and add to feed if you are paranoid about egg eating. I don't do that any more, I just toss them in their yard. I had a problem with a flock that included egg eaters and feather pecking. It was the first flock I had and the events started in late winter after they had been confined to the house and run with enough sq footage of space per the books I read. Shortly after that I read an article in Backyard Poultry Magazine that said these problems could be eliminated by free ranging. So I started letting my chickens out to roam more. It helped but did not completely solve the problem for that flock. Predators are bad here and one day when I left home unexpectedly my flock got thinned to almost nothing. I have since gotten an electric fence around the coup and run area and never have had a problem with egg eating or feather pecking again. I still free range them as much as possible but if I am not home or the predator situation has been bad I can confine them with plenty of room to roam.