What did you do in the garden today?

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Harvested my garlic today and a few softball sized red onions... 😊

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I also put up a couple of those Rescue brand Japanese Beetle traps. Thank you to whomever suggested them. I like the way they function... Let's hope they work as good as they look. 😉😂
 
gtaus said:
Well, that's exactly my point. I thought the "missing" eggshells meant that they had decomposed, and all that good eggshell calcium was available for the plants to take up. Evidently, I was wrong because the chemists are telling us that the eggshell calcium is bound up into calcium carbonate and cannot be used by the plants. It takes a chemical process to break the bond of the eggshell calcium in order to free it up to be used by the plants. That's why some people are using a vinegar solution to break the chemical bound of the eggshell calcium and then using the liquid as a super concentrated fertilizer.

I would like to try that vinegar solution someday as described in the PDF linked to us by @Smokerbill , but right now I have too many other projects higher on my to do list. So, I crushed up a small bag of eggshells this morning and tossed them into the chicken run as is. The chickens can eat what they want and the rest will get scratched into compost. Maybe a couple hundred years from now that calcium will be released into the soil and feed the plants.

Obviously, I will not be around to see the benefit of those eggshells. However, at least I did not dump them in the trash to fill up our landfills. That's some benefit to mankind, even if in a very small way. Also, I'm hoping that the chickens will eat some of the eggshells and that their bodies can extract the calcium via their digestive system.
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I don't bother with science. in my old place soil was poor and alkaline. I had never put any fertilizer, only my chicken's manure and eggshells/unhatched eggs. that was enough to get healthy vegetables.
 
I feed my chickens baked egg shells, whenever I bake, after I turn the oven off I just toss the shells in and leave them there until they are cooled down. Then I crumble them up and serve them in an extra dish for the chickens, and they love them. They don’t like oyster shells and if I give away too many eggs I have too little egg shells so the egg shells my chickens lay start to get thin , until I feed them the egg shells again.
 
gtaus said:
Some pallets it makes more sense to just use a sawzall and cut off the planks from the 2X4's, but that always leaves the bottom half of the pallet nail in the 2X4's with the fork cutouts. In this new raised bed design, I can use those 2X4's with the nails still embedded in the 2X4's because I don't need to cut the wood on my miter saw. That saves a lot of time and effort.

Also, using a demolition blade on a reciprocating saw to cut off the planks from the 2X4's is really fast and usually saves the entire length of the pallet plank. No need to try to remove the partial nails still in the 2X4's on this build.
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WOW! What a superb system. My first set of 5 is made of 2 layers of cherrystone landscape timbers, so only 8" tall and less soil weight in them means they will hopefully take longer to fail...but when they eventually do, I'm going to follow your design! No more sifting through pallets looking for the kind without the fork cutouts!
 

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