What do you do with your egg shells ?

[pascopol]

If the eggshells are dryed up, crushed and mixed with their feed, how your quail can associate them with fresh laid eggs?

No rocket science here.

In my experience coturnix quail will eat eggs if they are overcrowded and step on them before you pick the eggs up , then they start feasting on them.

Same with chickens, I always feed my chicks dried and crushed eggshells, if they need extra calcium they will eat them if not they will eat them later.

I am not wasting my money on oyster shells. Feed is expensive enough.

 

[Rozzie]

Whether or not oyster shell is a waste of money is subjective. To you it is; to some of us it is not. Since I only need a few pounds a year, this is not a major cost for me.

If I had hundreds of birds that I was supplementing, then I might feel differently. Perhaps it's partly a matter of the scale of operations. You have a lot of birds; I just have 50 birds.

I don't consider my way of making use of egg shells to be wasteful. They add calcium to my organic garden, which helps feed my family.

There are many ways of doing things.

 

[pascopol]

Quote:
Did you read my post before responding to it?

I never said "oyster shell is a waste of money"

I said "I do not waste my money on oystershells".

I never advocated feeding eggshells to anybody.

I said what I DO with MINE.

There is a big difference between recommending something to do or not to do to others

and stating what a person does himself or herself.

All it takes to notice this difference to read the post not "read into it".

 

[Rozzie]

Quote:
Did you read my post before responding to it?

I never said "oyster shell is a waste of money"

I said "I do not waste my money on oystershells".

I never advocated feeding eggshells to anybody.

I said what I DO with MINE.

There is a big difference between recommending something to do or not to do to others

and stating what a person does himself or herself.

All it takes to notice this difference to read the post not "read into it".

There is no reason to be rude. You are splitting hairs. I did read your post. When you state that you are not wasting YOUR money in a certain way in response to someone who spends money on that particular item -- and has said so -- then there is an implied statement about that person's expenditure. Perhaps you did not mean it this way, however that is how your post came across.

Again, there are many ways of doing things. You choose to feed crushed eggshells & consider it a waste of your money to feed oyster shell. I choose to feed oyster shell and not eggshells and do not consider the expenditure a waste of money. As I said, different ways of doing things. I never stated that you suggested feeding eggshells to anyone else's birds. Not sure where you got that from.

Can we not keep this a friendly place? My post was in no way intended to be taken in a hostile or rude manner. I'm not sure why it elicited such a response.

 

[Wifezilla]

I never said "oyster shell is a waste of money"

I said "I do not waste my money on oystershells".

Pascopol, When you use the word WASTE, what do you expect? If you have said "I don't SPEND my money on oyster shell" your post would make more sense.

Rozzie, when I add those egg shells to the garden the plants do so much better. I did put some oyster shell along with some egg shell in the holes when I planted my tomatoes. They went NUTS!!! The vines overgrew their rather large cages and stakes. I had lots of tomatoes for drying, canning and eating fresh...and Colorado is not an easy place to grow tomatoes!​

 

[PoultryParadise]

I feed some of my egg shells to my ferret, dogs, cats, and even the pigs. For the same reason some people feed them to their chickens, I feed it to my other animals. In winter time I feed calcium to the chickens in the form of oyster shell, and in the summer they get sometimes way too much calcium from something on pasture, still trying to figure that one out.
However in responce to your original question, my other animals get it to help with their calcium needs. Especially the ferret, and dogs, they get some daily.
If they are really pretty eggs I blow the egg out and decorate them using wax and dyes (pysanka) or make them into jewlery and decorations.

 

[HEChicken]

Quote:
Cool. I finally found a use for my oyster shell that I purchased earlier this year! When I first got the chooks, I saved my egg shells, then baked and crushed them to feed back to the girls. When all my girls are laying age, I feed layer food and find they don't eat a lot of supplemental calcium. However every Spring I add a few new chicks and for the period of time that all are eating out of the same feeder, I switch to grower formula and add supplemental calcium for the layers. Anyway, I found that the layers LOVE the crushed egg shell. They recognize the jar I keep it in and every day when I went outside to give it to them they would be literally jumping up in the air pecking at the outside of the jar in their eagerness to get to it. I'd put some in my palm and they'd gobble it down like it was scratch. Since I let them eat as much as they seemed to want/need, eventually I ran out of egg shells, and had to buy some oyster shell. I expected them to go for it as they did the egg shell but no. They refused to touch it. VERY occasionally one of them will peck at it in a disinterested kind of way but.....of the 50lb bag I bought, I'd guess I still have more than 49.75lb. Meanwhile, I have continued to save egg shells, but once they were back on layer feed, they mostly lost interest in this too. This is good actually, as it has allowed me to build up a good supply so that next Spring when I get my new chicks and have to put them back on grower formula, I should have enough egg shell saved to get them through those 8-12 weeks that they need the supplement.

By the way, I have had NO issues with egg eating. I do understand the concerns people about this, but I have always baked the shells (doesn't require much effort. Whenever I use an egg, I place the shell on a cookie sheet. After I've used the oven and turned it off, I put the cookie sheet in the oven so the shells bake in the residual heat of the oven as it cools down. Doing it this way I don't need to worry about timers and burning them - they are always just perfectly dried out and easy to crush). I crush manually and get them down to 1/4" size pieces. I really do not think the girls recognize them at all.

And now that I have a practical use for the oyster shell on the garden, I don't have to kick myself as much for spending the money on such a big bag.

 

[LivinNewDreamInND]

I save them for my squash and pumpkin plants. It supplies them with calcium and keeps the slugs and snails away. I am sure it works for other plants too, but my 96 yo Great Grandma told me to use them on squash plants so thats what I do.

 

[ParadiseFoundFarm]

First - Glad you guys got back on topic because it's a good one and I find the reponses have a lot of valuable information and advice. Thank you.
What I knew about chickens before I became a chicken raiser came from grandmother.
GM gave everything to them - including egg shells. They always went crazy for the egg shell but they never ate her eggs so I too give them shells.
What HEChicken said was very telling: they didn't really want it unless they needed it...Hmmmmmmm
I like the idea of drying them in the oven. Does that jar of yours ever get stinky?
Just an aside - Wifezilla & Rozzie ; It's the Christmas/Hannaka season - be nice or Santa won't bring you anything.

 

[HEChicken]

Quote:
Not at all, that I've noticed. If I really put my nose into it there is a distinct odor but its not that unpleasant. I don't plan on ever using the jar for anything else.