using eggshells

What do people do with eggshells? My grandmother (in a tiny village in rural Russia) saves them, bakes them dry in the oven, grinds them up and mixes them with the chicken feed. I know a lot of people use them as slug barriers in the veg garden but I have never had any success with this method. We eat quite a lot of eggs and at the moment I have a cardboard box full of shells so I'm trying to figure out the easiest but most efficient use for them - supplement for animal feed, ground up addition to compost/soil, other?

We put them in the compost. Earthworms love eggshells!

Well, some surplus eggs get fed to the pigs whole, so they compost them. We also feed surplus eggs to the dogs, and they leave the shells laying around and often the hens will find them and eat them (or at least the roosters try to lure the hens over with eggshell bits).

I bake mine in the oven to sterilize/remove organic residues, grind, then add ACV and make Soluble Calcium and Soluble Calcium Phosphate, dilute down and foliar spray plants. Also, give to wormery, grit for chickens and if any is still left over I will just add to the traditional compost bin...

I give them directly back to the chickens each day that I use them. No baking, grinding or crushing~just feed them back to the chickens or the dog, whomever gets to them first. I have used them crushed around the tomato plants before to let the calcium leach into the soils where it will do the most good.

we air dry ours out, crush them up and add them to the layer feed.

i don't have chickens, but I do rinse them out, crush them up, and throw them out in the yard. sometimes with mulch too.

I save up all the shells over winter and then dump a bunch under each tomato plant. I've read the calcium is important to the tomatoes. Crunching is a good idea.

Guarren cito wrote:I save up all the shells over winter and then dump a bunch under each tomato plant. I've read the calcium is important to the tomatoes. Crunching is a good idea.

Good use of them.
"Blossom end rot" is a common disease of tomatoes. It is a calcium deficiency.

lucy, calcium is an important supplement to poultry feed. A lot of people in the UK buy 'fine grit' made of ground up oyster shells to mix with their grain, but I guess eggshells are similar and not an external input. They are hard, but then again chickens eat rocks! (well, for their crop/gizzard)


Thanks for all the replies. I am still saving them up while I procrastinate over a decision.

I use eggshells as an ingredient for my compost. I used to try and process them for the hens as a supplement but laziness gets the better of me.