Eggshell pots- very random

I needed to spend an afternoon in the kitchen taking care of various chores, chopping veg for soup, making bread, taking care of the eggshells (keep reading) and cleaning. I love to be in my kitchen, but I HATE cleaning it. Especially wiping down the stove. Despicable chore. Say hello to my rising sour dough.

"Hello Sourdough!"

A few weeks ago on Pinterest I was seeing all of these pins about using eggshells as mini pots to start out your seedlings. This sounded like a good idea to me as they are all natural and I adore eggs. A fried egg is one of my favorite lunches. However, I am becoming a preemptive egg snob as my husband and I are preparing to get chickens this spring. I've been reading as many chicken books as I can get my hands on and talking to the internets to get as much chicken information into my brain as possible. And what I've learned is this 1) converting that weird horse stall on our property into a chicken coop is going to be harder than I thought and 2) grocery store eggs are crap and not worth $1.20 a dozen. So in my snobbish frugality, I have not been buying as many eggs as usual and thus if I'm going to have enough egg shells to start my 500 tomato plants come March, I need to start now.

Phashoo!

The sites I checked said to gently wash out the eggshell. Yeah right. Can you picture me washing an eggshell? Plan B, I decided to bake the shells to solidify and dry any extra egg white left inside to keep them from decomposing over the next two months (eww).

Set your oven to 350. Place shells on the floor of your oven. You could put them on a cookie sheet or in a muffin tin, but why add more dishes.

These are only going to bake off for 2 or 3 minutes. In the time it took me to move my onions into the sunlight and snap a few pictures, my shells got a little over cooked. Pull them out when they look like this. They don't need to be darker

I use a spoon to scoop them off the floor of the oven, and I'm storing them stacked in a plastic container uncovered.

And speaking of gardening, my godfather who has owned a greenhouse for most of his adult life, told me if I want good onions this fall, I need to start them from seeds in January. So last weekend I took my mini pots, because I don't have enough eggshells yet, and chipped away enough of my frozen compost pile to plant 40 onion seeds. Then the new kitten sat on the sprouts and if that wasn't enough, he also started eating them.

The survivors

And speaking of onions, my sister was telling me that the last time she bought green onions she threw the roots in a cup of water and grew new onions. So I tried it and it really works. I had a small batch so to start I put mine in a shot glass. They had grown half an inch IN THE FIRST DAY! I could not believe it. These are definitely helping my gardener's soul survive the cold, dark, dreaded month of January. About a week or a week and a half in they graduated to a real cup. You just pull them out and change out the water if it starts to look cloudy. Mine have enough roots now that they're sucking down the water before it needs changed so I just need to add more when it gets low.

Oh I love things that are green! I hope you're finding something that helps you get through the cold, dark nights as well. Spring is coming!