So, here's the theory: Eggshells have lime in them which will help you rebalance your soil's pH, in addition to adding calcium and other goodies. Lime (limestone) in the soil produces a very neutral pH, and one that is just on the high side of ideal for growing marijuana in. This is good because most pH imbalances are the result of too much fertilization which has a tendency to lower the pH in your soil, since fertilizers are mostly acidic and acid is on the lower side of the spectrum while alkaline is on the higher side.

If your leaves are turning yellow, starting at the tips and progressing to the rest of the leaf you are overfertilizing and your pH is almost definitely too low. There is no deficiency that I know of that results in burnt leaf tips as a symptom. So if this is the case you'll want to increase your soil's alkalinity.

The experiment:

I recently overfertilized some seedlings and I read that eggshells have lime in them. I decided to today to try to make an emergency pH tonic out of organic household items. I did not flush the plants, this is an experiment.

I took a 1.75 litre Simple Orange orange juice bottle and 4 eggshells (we cooked and ate the contents). I filled the bottle a little more than halfway full of water. Then I put the eggshells in a cereal bowl and used a wooden spoon to crush the shells like a mortar and pestil for about 20 minutes. At first the eggshells were hard to crush and were sliding around in the bowl, but the more I got them crushed the easier it got and the less they slid across the bottom of the bowl. Then carefully, a little at a time, I added the tiny pieces of crushed eggshells into the narrow opening of the simple orange bottle. Almost all of the visible pieces of eggshell sank to the bottom, but there were also lots of tiny particles well distributed throughout the water, that's the idea; to make liquid eggshells. I screwed the cap on and shook well.

Since my seedlings haven't been watered in a few days I gave all 14 of them a dose of the tonic water. It's only about 6 hours later and it already looks a little like some of the fert burn spots are not looking so dry. Obviously I don't know if that's from the tonic water or just increased time since the trauma but I would not expect that the tonic is working that fast. Even if I was convinced it was I wouldn't make a claim like that without pictures for everyone else to see. In any case, I expect it to be a few days before I can report any real relevant observations.

My mum, still an indoor gardener at 86, usually has a bottle of eggshell water going for her house plants. It always smells like sulpher, and it makes me puke if I get too big a whiff of it, but she has been doing it for years and swears by it. She just puts uncrushed egg shells into a gallon of water, and lets them sit. She uses it if she thinks of it, and just waters as her plants need it. i am sure it has good stuff in it.

Thanks for taking us on your experiment with you! I will be watching to see what you learn.

Welcome to GreenPassion! Glad to have another Nature Lover on board! I am an organic soil grower as well. Nice to share learning.

Peace

__________________
Life,
j-angel

aka GP purrie kittie attack cat!


My Little Grow LST'ing w/Hardware

My Outdoor Odyssey 2008 BONSAI MUMS

My Little Grow Indoor To Outdoor 2009

my mum uses egg shell in the garden compost..

Like Jangel said,, I have seen it used many time by the old timers,, egg shells in water, it stinks but the swear by it

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Simply grinding them up and sprinkling them in the soil won't do anything
as it takes quite a while for them to breakdown into a form the plant
can use.
However, cooking or fermenting them first in water to break them down will do the trick.

After a while, the eggshells get very very thin. If you have ever seen how soft an eggshell is after it is first laid, or if it is not formed right, that is what it is like.

__________________
Life,
j-angel

aka GP purrie kittie attack cat!


My Little Grow LST'ing w/Hardware

My Outdoor Odyssey 2008 BONSAI MUMS

My Little Grow Indoor To Outdoor 2009

There are lots of bubbles in there and foam at the top, especially after I shake it each time before use. If nothing else, the water is well oxygenated, but you can also see that there's definitely a reaction going on. The idea behind crushing the eggshells was just to add more surface area so any reaction/decomposition would happen more rapidly.

It makes me feel good to hear so much mention of the "old-timers" having faith in this method. I think we need to go back to doing things the way that they had been done for thousands of generations rather than continuing on with the petrol-saturated factory farming "technologies" of today. Not just in the cannabis industry but all crops.

Anyway, don't want to get on a rant or anything, just saying.

As far as the plants, they are looking very nice and vibrant today in comparison with yesterday, when I was thinking that most or all of them would probably die. They were all badly damaged. I'll try to get some pictures up later today if I can get some with any detail on a cellphone.

__________________

Nothing that I say is true. When I use the word "I" I am referring to a fictional entity.

Current Grow:
http://www.greenpassion.org/f24/cfl-closet-grow-14588/

I agree 200% with you about getting back to nature. this is why I live on a small farm. There are positive things about each generation. I think the trick is to pick out the best ones and take advantage of them. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater I mean. Don't forget, without computors we would not be sharing ideas, so there is good and bad from each generation and period of time.

Peace

__________________
Life,
j-angel

aka GP purrie kittie attack cat!


My Little Grow LST'ing w/Hardware

My Outdoor Odyssey 2008 BONSAI MUMS

My Little Grow Indoor To Outdoor 2009

Oh yeah I definitely agree, but when it comes to what we should put in our bodies (or in our plants' bodies) I think nature knows best. After all, evolution takes a long time and we spent a long time adapting to the things we were eating before, so I think that a diet that we evolved with is an ideal diet.

In any case, with computer technology I really love the internet and all that, and we definitely wouldn't be able to communicate in the same way without computers. Then again, without computers nobody on earth would be capable of launching an ICBM with the push of a button (or even several pushes by people with several different access codes). So in other words, I agree that there are good things about advanced technologies, I just think that in general, most times I don't find the benefits to outweigh the detractors.

To go back to the example about factory farming, yeah you can sure feed a hell of a lot more people that way with a lot less space, money and energy, but I don't think anything outweighs the horrors faced by the victims of factory farming, to say nothing of the pollution.

Like, a car can take you across a continent in a matter of days, but also tens of thousands of people are killed in automobile accidents every year, and the cumulative effect of all the cars is poisoning our atmosphere, along with every high tech industry out there, no exceptions that I can think of. Anyway, I'm not tryin to argue but my own personal preference tends to be the less advanced the technology the more beneficial for people and the less destructive of nature. I think this applies to everything, but especially to food.

__________________

Nothing that I say is true. When I use the word "I" I am referring to a fictional entity.

Current Grow:
http://www.greenpassion.org/f24/cfl-closet-grow-14588/