Anytime we find a way to save our food scraps from the bin, we take it – see our previous posts on how to give your tea bags and cauliflower leaves another life!
So, we decided to see what we could do with the humble eggshell. While we rarely have a second thought about chucking them out, the shells are surprisingly versatile and it’s egg-tremely easy to give them a second go around…
1. Sprinkle around your garden to deter pests.
A great way to save eggshells is to sprinkle shards of the shell in the garden in order to deter snails and slugs from attacking your veggies and plants. These soft-bodied pests don’t like crawling over the sharp pieces of eggshell – cheap and effective!
2. Plant seedlings in them.
Planting seedlings in eggshells is a perfect way to make something pretty out of your discarded shells. Plus, the finished product makes a cute indoor feature for your kitchen – simply display them in an empty egg carton. While there is a bit of a process to get the eggshell seedlings up and running – you can read a detailed how-to here – it’s worth it for the end result. A fun school holiday activity, perhaps?
3. Fertiliser for your garden.
Eggshells are brimming with calcium and minerals, so they make the perfect natural fertiliser for your garden. Simply crush the shells into pieces before sprinkling around your plants. The broken shells are particularly great for preventing a common rotting problem in tomatoes – which can be combatted by adding the shells to the soil before planting the tomato plant.
4. Feed them back to your chooks.
While this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, you can actually feed the crushed up shells back to your chickens. Laying hens require a lot of calcium as so much is leached into the shells – which can be drained from the hen’s bones if she doesn’t have enough in her diet. So, feeding laying hens calcium-rich eggshells is a quick and easy way to up their calcium intake.
5. Make a skin-tightening face mask with them!
Yep, you read that right! You can make a cheap face mask all from eggshells. Simply crush the shells down in a mortar and pestle until they become a fine powder, then add a whisked egg white to the powder and voilà! Allow the mask to dry and then rinse off, leaving your skin feeling firm and soft.
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