 Welcome to the Rustic Garden. Today I want to talk to you about how to best use eggshells calcium carbonate in your garden. This is really for tomatoes but other vegetables also need calcium. Tomatoes need calcium because they can get a disease called Blossom Endrot. I don't know if you've ever gotten it, you would know the bottom of your green tomatoes typically turn brown and that's usually due to a lack of calcium in the soil or an inability for your plant to use the calcium in the soil. Today I wanted to show you how to best use egg shells because it will add calcium to your soil. This is about a dozen eggs that I say. First thing is is save the shells and then you actually want to heat them in the oven at about 180 degrees for about two hours. That just helps dry them out. You don't want to raise the temperature really past 180 degrees Fahrenheit because the egg shells can burn and it does make an awful smell and you really just don't need to do that. Now sometimes I've talked about throwing crushed egg shells in your tomato hole and that's great. You can do that but this is calcium carbonate. Egg shells are calcium carbonate which is CA CO3. It's 95% calcium carbonate. The other parts of the egg shell are calcium phosphate and magnesium carbonate. Now you want your egg shells to be broken down either in your compost pile or in your soil so that it breaks down into just calcium. The calcium is the mineral that your tomato plant uses and that's the form that's needed for the roots to pull it into the system of the plant. A couple of things again. If you throw this into your tomato planting hole or in a compost pile these will take much longer to decay because there's not as much surface area than if you crush them up and when you break something you increase the surface area by exposing the edges and that allows bacteria and different things to get into the egg shell and break it down. The best way to use it the best way to utilize egg shells is to really pulverize it and this is a couple of egg shells in here. Pulverize down almost into a dust and there's probably literally a million times more surface area in here than right here because you've just broken it down into really really fine particles and how I do it is I just use a coffee grinder put the egg shells in and just grind it down and that's what I'm going to do with all of these egg shells is pulverize them. Now once you pulverize them you can put this into your compost pile or put it into your planting hole but it's still going to need to break down but this will break down a lot more quickly than the bigger shells or the crumbled shells. Now I'm going to show you how to even break this down more. You can add white vinegar which is acidic acid and the calcium and the vinegar are going to react and it's going to break down the calcium carbonate and calcium that is readily available. What that means is just because you put the egg shells into the soil it doesn't mean that it's readily available to the plant so you want to either put this in your compost pile and let it break down and then this calcium will be readily available to your plant or you can do this trick. This is a table spoon of crushed egg cells and two tablespoons of vinegar and people are concerned sometimes when you do this because vinegar is an acid or this is litmus paper I've already tested it and it comes out neutral but I'm going to do it again real quick here. So take a teaspoon of the crushed egg shells we're going to add white vinegar and let me show you white vinegar is an acid so when we dip it in here this comes out very very red on the high or on the low end of this litmus scale or one or two which means it's very very acidic so I'm going to take a about a teaspoon that's a little bit more you do one to two teaspoons of vinegar and you can see it maybe slightly but it's starting to bubble and what happens is the vinegar and the egg shell react and I'm going to give you basically what happens the calcium carbonate and that's the vinegar react and he break down into calcium the CA water H2O and carbon dioxide CO2 so the vinegar and the egg shell break down or react together to break down the calcium carbonate and that's what you want you just want the plain calcium now this is phoned up a lot and I'm going to keep swishing it around a little bit now the reason that you do that again is because you want your calcium to be readily available so egg shell again is calcium carbonate it will break down naturally over time big egg shells will take about a year the crushed egg shells might take six months or so if you put them into your compost pile and it's a great compost pile and it heats up it could be quicker but this is the quickest way to get the calcium or get the egg shell into its best form for your tomato plant to use it now let's let that sit you after you do this you wanted to sit for about an hour just to let the vinegar and the egg shell react together so I'm going to do another video to show you how I prepare and this is going to be for the new year I've used these ingredients before egg shell and magnesium sulfate or epsom salt I'm going to show you how to make a pint container of water egg shell and magnesium sulfate for your tomato so that when you transplant it you're putting right into the hole the main ingredients for it to fight up blossom enroute and it's a preventative thing but I'm going to do that on this separate video now just for you who may not believe that this is neutral or at least less acidic than it was I'm going to put this in there now and you can see let me get the other one this was the vinegar pure vinegar this is the calcium carbonate the egg shell and the vinegar together so it really neutralizes itself and it's somewhere around this range so you don't have to worry about the vinegar being too acidic for the planting hole again egg shells are a great source of calcium but in its form of an egg shell it's not readily available to your tomato plant so you either have to compost it and let it break down or you can do this process which will speed it up a little bit more so you're going to have calcium in here that's ready for the plant and whatever doesn't get broken down by the vinegar will break down in the planting hole hope you enjoyed the video there's a lot of information out there about egg shells hopefully this clarified it a little bit please check out my blog at www.theRustardGarden.blogspot.com and also check out my YouTube videos thanks