Stitch Farm – Blog

Your laying hens use lots of calcium to produce eggs. There is no better way to replenish that calcium than to supplement it with the same calcium that came straight from them. Give the eggshells in a separate container than their regular feed, like you would oyster shells, scratch, or other supplements and treats. This way the chickens can choose, or not, when to eat it. The shells don’t have to be crushed up as small as when using for soil. You could just crush them in your hand. We find using a single method for preparing our shells is the easiest way for us.
Myths About Feeding your Chickens Eggshells

Add eggshells to your soil to reduce the acidity of your soil, use as a fertilizer, or as mulch.
How to Use Eggshells in the Garden
How to Use Eggshells in Green Gardening

We keep our eggshells from daily use and from when we freeze dry eggs [link]. To do this, we:

1. Preheat the oven to 225
2. Rinse off the shells
3. Place in the oven for 10-20 minutes

I like to put them on a pan inside down and turn them over halfway through the oven time. Once they are dried out, place them in the blender until they have a nice consistency like this:
[insert picture]
Note:We recommend using a glass blender container. The first time we crushed our eggshells, we used our small plastic “tumbler” type container, and it got scratched up pretty good. Eggshells are hard!
[insert picture of the scratched up tumbler]