Coffee grounds and egg shells
If I lived in the sunny south, it would be possible to breakfast in the garden with a nice plate of eggs and coffee (if I drank coffee) and enjoy myself as the sun warms the day and awakens the already vigorous spring plants for another burst of growth. Well, I don’t live in the sunny south and right now the only eggs and coffee in the garden are the ones I’m using as amendments.
Raised bed sprinkled with egg shells
One nice benefit of having chickens is that we have a lot of eggs. This means we have a lot of egg shells. Egg shells are a great soil amendment. Not only do they add useful calcium to the soil, they also work as a slug deterrent. Apparently slugs don’t like slithering over the crunchy, scratchy shell bits. To use eggs in the garden, rinse them after cracking. Let them dry completely and then chop them up in a food processor. You’ll get a nice texture for sprinkling or digging into beds.
Coffee grounds sprinkled around blueberries
We also save our used coffee grounds. Coffee grounds can be added to compost piles (as can egg shells) or you can sprinkle them around acid-loving plants such as blueberries.
Well, there’s my breakfast in the garden. Maybe this summer I’ll be able to breakfast in the garden for real. 🙂
Sandy
The 10 Year Challenge 
Grinning, sounds wonderful.
This morning unless your plate was made from a 10 pound chunk of cast iron, I don’t think you could keep it from blowing away.
It’s still a bit cool in the morning to set with comfort in my garden, it was 53 degrees but still all in all to cool for me.
Happy gardening
I should follow your lead and do the rinsing and chopping of the egg shells (makes a nice amendment to sprinkle on) but I am lazy! I just crush the eggshells in my hand and drop them into my compost canister in the kitchen along with all the other kitchen scraps and they go straight into the compost pile. It works fine – but does not provide the slug deterrent that your method provides.
I was really excited to hear of another slug remedy–can’t wait to try it! I’m really interested in your website. I’m trying to do something similar in the city (Philadelphia), on a much smaller scale (we have probably 1/20 of the land that you do). We put in raised beds this spring and are going to plant a fig tree next month. I’ll have to look on your site for more ideas that we can adapt on a small scale. It would be so exciting to have eggs you raise yourself!