6/20/2024 Broken Eggshells

Today I threw away eggshells. I want to compost and use as much of my waste as possible so this seems unacceptable. The problem is that the soil where I live in Arizona, especially after being watered with city water, has a lot of minerals including calcium in it. This is at least partially because the water mainly comes from the Colorado River in canals and as the water evaporates the minerals become more concentrated. I haven’t actually done a soil test on my property yet but I don’t think it’s a good idea to put all the eggshells we get into the ground at this point.

I had collected all my eggshells for a long time and had quite a large volume, and I was planning on using them with my vermiculture setup once I got it going. Then when I started with the worms, I quickly came to realize that the shells were pretty hard to break up (the worms have very small mouths!) Also It didn’t take much for the worms, and it’s still adding calcium probably. The eggshells were hard to clean as well and could contain pathogens if not properly cleaned, I believe I have read. Instead of eggshells I have started using little bits of azomite in my worm bin.

I’m going to assume that I do not want to add the chicken shells to my soil, as there are many uses where they end up in the soil such as preventing pests, composting etc. One grey area is potted plants. I think that potted plants end up with quite a bit of calcium as well if they are being watered with city water, but it may not be calcium that is bioavailable to the plants (which of coarse could be true of the in ground plants as well, so I need to keep learning about soil). Another use that kinda falls into this category is using them in your coffee to reduce the bitterness, because at that point you still either throw away or compost your eggshells and coffee grounds.

You can feed them to chickens if you have them. When I grew up we had chickens and we would crush the shells up to replace the calcium they need to make the eggs. I remember my mom telling me to make sure to crush them up very well or else the chickens will realize they can eat their eggs and will then start to eat their own eggs. I’m not sure if that’s true but I believe she told me that. Sometimes we would use crushed oyster shells but using the eggshells makes it somewhat of a complete loop, at least with the calcium.

I’ve read that you can eat them or feed them to your dogs. You can basically make your own calcium suppliments, but if you do not have the proper vitamins and minerals then your body may not be able to absorb it. The other thing I would worry about is kidney stones. I believe different types of calcium are more of a risk for kidney stones but since I do not know much about that, I’m kinda unsure about this.

I don’t have chickens yet, and I’ve read about a bunch of things you can do but most either end up in the garden, or they are other things I have never tried like using them for arts and crafts or to start plants. It seems like more work than its worth to use them to start plants but hey if that sounds like something you want to do that’s cool.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with my eggshells yet. Hmmm…..