sounds stinky but maybe I will try it in a comparison sometime

"Fill the pot with 2 inches of potting soil. Place one uncracked raw egg in the pot..."

Unless I'm growing moss, or possibly grass, I think I want more than 2" of potting MIX. If I am growing moss or grass, I'd rather eat the egg fresh than use it for fertilizer.

Thanks, but I don't think I will subscribe to "Redbook" for gardening tips.

Also, if you have any critters in your yard, they might smell the egg and dig up the pot to get to it. I tried putting banana peels in the soil under potted plants one year and the raccoons thought I had set out a fruit compote just for them. I ended up having to repot a bunch of plants after they had left them scattered around the yard.

Sandy

Well, I think it's an odd recommendation, but maybe not entirely unreasonable since a lot of old-time farmers used fish in a planting hole for vegetables. My grandfather did -- he also had a fishing boat that enabled him to sell fish. The culls became fertilizer for the farm. Maybe eggs are just as beneficial to plants -- who knows?

I don't think I'd want to put it in a potted plant soil though.

My sister raises chickens and often puts an egg in the hole when planting tomatoes, they have never had a problem with anything digging them up, but they do live in a big city with not that many wild animals. Although, there is not really any difference between the ones that were planting with eggs and the ones that are not.

I do think it would be weird to not crack the egg, though. Because you really would not want it whole.

This is a good question. I have chickens, and every few days, there's an egg that's cracked or really dirty or otherwise gets rejected for the table. But if was actually helpful for the garden, it would be good to know. Currently, I compost them, for lack of better ideas.

--Jonathan

I think they're confusing whole eggs with egg shells, which are a good calcium source (I've even heard from hydroponic growers who dissolve them in vinegar to create calcium acetate, which they use to provide the calcium to their plants).

All eggs are is proteins, fats, cholesterol, minerals, vitamins

Sounds decent but for potted plants is kinda sketchy unless you have some healthy soil from outside with a lot of biological activity in it to feast on the egg before it rots.

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Egg_Yolk.html

Scroll down a little to the table, itll tell you what eggs are made of

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/Egg_Yolk.html

I'd be curious to see if it works, but offhand it sounds completely idiotic. I think it would either sit there and do nothing-- eggs last for a really long time, even out of the fridge-- or it would rot and smell. (Especially in potting soil, which would probably lack the bacteria that break down organic material in the ground). Sounds like one of those articles that tells you if you mix olive oil and mayonnaise and leave it on your hair for six hours it'll never be frizzy again. Either someone's a total idiot, or they're having a really good laugh in the break room at the magazine, thinking about people planting chicken eggs and conditioning with rotten mayo. . .

Haha I read the same article and was just doing a google search to see if there was anything to it. Personally I see no way the shell could break down in any reasonable length of time. Might be worth testing for the scientific ones among us. They also suggested you break the roots apart with your fingers before potting, somthing I never do. I try not to disturb the roots at all.

"Unless I'm growing moss, or possibly grass, I think I want more than 2" of potting MIX."
tdscpa, they meant you put 2" of soil, then the egg, then your plant and the rest of the dirt. A lot more than 2" total.

Roots would break down an egg shell pretty quickly I would imagine.

There is no doubt that any organic mater(eggs, fish, flesh, bone,..) eventually will decompose and can provide some nutrients for the plant life.So this can include an egg, a dead rat, squirrel,...
What is in egg(contents) is some water and protein,
( consisting mainly of these elements: C, H, N, O, S,)
What plants can utilize from those is "N" which is about 1.2% of total. This is not a whole lot for a pot, EVEN if it is fully decomposed on time. A handfull of dry horse or cow manure in place of that egg can provide many times more nutients that are readily available.
You want to make it slow release? Mix it with clay soil, form it as a cooki(hehe, no cholesterol))

Find a better source for garden info. Fish ain't eggs.

I always heard the for compost, animal matter should be avoided. With that, it seems to me that whole eggs would rot and become fetid for your plants. Eggs shells are a different matter because they add minerals to your soil. I would avoid whole raw eggs!

I heard about âÂÂwhole eggâ method for rooting cuttings.
Before calling this method âÂÂidioticâÂÂ, maybe, people should try it first and see what will happen. The fact that you canâÂÂt envision benefits does not mean there are no benefits.
I remember, few years ago someone from Brugmansia international forum did the experiment with âÂÂwhole eggâ growing method : she took a couple of hard-to-root brugmansia cuttings and planted them in 2 identical pots with the same potting soil: just one pot had a whole egg buried in the soil. In a few weeks, she removed the cuttings from the soil and showed the pictures of both. The difference was amazing: the roots of the âÂÂeggedâ cutting were twice as big and dense as non-âÂÂeggedâ one. She didnâÂÂt invent this method , " she actually heard it from someone else, so this practice is not that new.
And the success was attributed not to the nutrients in the egg, but to the hydrogen sulfide gas (and possibly other gases) that the rotting eggs would constantly emit in the soil somehow stimulating the root development of the plant.

**********added later***********
If you google âÂÂrooting cuttings egg methodâÂÂ, you will find plenty of references to first-hand experiences of people using âÂÂwhole eggâ rooting method.
Here, I found it on Plumeria site as well:
http://www.plumeria2u.co.uk/page.html?id=20

And here is Brugmansia (with comparison pictures):
http://www.trumpetflowers.com/experiments/egg-versus-rooting-hormone-plant-propagation.htm

This post was edited by green_go on Sun, Feb 24, 13 at 18:46

Is it fair to say that people have been growing plants in containers successfully for a long time without the benefit of whole eggs? So what's the point? Eat the egg, pot the plant. Any potential benefit to the plant would be far less than the benefit from eating the egg.

Hydrogen sulfide has been shown to promote root growth in many ornamental plant cuttings...that said you can buy a huge bucket of sodium hydrosulfide which will break down into hydrogen sulfide for a few dollars without messing with eggs or the proper environment to produce hydrogen sulfide by excluding oxygen from the deep root zone.

That said...it's still more of a novelty for anything grown from seed vs something you're trying to promote root growth with cuttings.

Well, I, for one, am glad that green_go z5a provided such a good explanation and link to the page on rooting with an egg. You might not think it's useful to "waste" an egg on such a silly thing, but I've come upon the problem of having a half dozen eggs go bad on me while having a broken stove/oven.

So while looking for a use for rotten eggs, I found this.

I have a couple of plants that I'd like to root and what better use for those rotten eggs than to help me root my cuttings. At worst, I get no good roots and I'll have to compost the soil, or I get good roots and still have to compost the soil.

I'm glad someone was thinking outside of the ....eggshell

This is just in-situ composting, but with a relatively expensive compost material. A fish or an egg in a hole I can sorta understand. But in a pot?? Ick.

Now, to the extent that hydrogen sulfide helps seedlings, and to the extent that rotten eggs smell like hydrogen sulfide, there are better ways to get hydrogen sulfide than by rotting eggs. Of course, if you rot your egg in a pot that is sitting in the air, your nose will know, as will those of your guests. Might as well drop some septic tank material in the pot as well. That'll make hydrogen sulfide too.

Sure, if you have a bunch of rotten eggs, throw them in the compost heap. Won't hurt.

Is Salmonella poisoning a possibility when using raw eggs or will the plant naturally cleanse the bacteria?

I would at least break the egg a little bit, if you are wanting some kind of slow break-down, or break it in half and pour the contents into the pot (even mixing it) if you want faster. The reason for this is that I've had whole eggs in a compost bin before, and although I thought I had cracked them all, there were some that remained uncracked for several months until I was using the compost. At that time, I found they were not cracked, anjd proceeded to crack them. It was a horrible smell.

It disappeared soon enough but I would rather not have that smell.

I came across this information on facebook & thought it would be a great share here.

To make a Concoction (Egg Amino Acid)

Take 2 Organic eggs (without breaking it) in a glass container and soak them entirely with lemon juice. Seal it and keep it away from direct sunlight.
Open the Jar every 3 days to let the gases out.
At the end of 18 day period, you would notice all the calcium has dissolved and settled at the bottom.

You add 250gms of powdered jaggery, stir it (your eggs would have broken down during this period) and store it for a period of 10 days.

What you have is an effective concentrate. You would need to dilute in proportion and store the balance concentrate.
For spraying on vegetables - ratio of 2 ml to 1 lit of water
For pouring on soil - ratio of 100 ml to 3.5 lit of water.

Benefits:
Gives new Vigor to the plant, increasing flowering & gives good fruiting results.

Credit: Sourced from Mr Binuraj Purushothaman.

:

This post was edited by ashok767 on Wed, Aug 13, 14 at 3:51

I used eggs as fertilizer under my eggplants and got these results :

{{gwi:80724}}

Yes, a Bad Yoke I know.

2 years later I am researching garden uses for an expired dozen of free range eggs and Google leads me here. I agree with the positive posters. I say proper burial of the whole raw egg is key. The dozen will go first in the big deep hole for a young mulberry tree in a well drained area, and/or for the three banana pups waiting to go in the ground. So many new plantings these eggs prompted me to get done before winter.

"new plantings these eggs prompted me to get done before winter."

Google can lead us to all sorts of things but it is up to us to decide which have value. So prompting you to get the plantings done before winter is probably the most useful thing the eggs will do.

Dave

IF you don't have racoons, etc., there's no real problem with getting rid of the occasional dud eggs by burying them in your garden, I guess. It's just not going to be some kind of miracle fertilizer. Actively putting perfectly good eggs to use like this, though, seems like a huge waste of money and perfectly serviceable food.

pontyrogof: I am researching garden uses for an expired dozen of free range eggs

Expiry dates mark when stores have to stop selling a product, not when the product goes bad. Big difference. Eggs have a really long shelf life, particularly when refrigerated. Go by whether the eggs are actually rotten, not by the date on the package.

Yes, the "sell by" dates on boxes of eggs is to some extent made up out of whole cloth. One good test for an egg is whether it floats. If it does, then gasses from decomposition have built up inside. Don't even break it open.

I too find it hard to believe that eggs are some kind of miracle plant fertilizer. Eggshells do have a lot of calcium, but it isn't in soluble form, and may take years to leach out of the shells. The few sources that advocate using raw eggs as fertilizer make the point that eggs are nutrient rich! Yeah, they're nutrient rich for chicks, but not for plants. The nutritional needs of plants are VASTLY different. It would be interesting to see some biochemical evaluation of raw eggs as fertilizer, but it seems like pure mythology to me. By the same token, we should bury iron bars in with our plants to make them, er, strong.

That being the case, if you've got a lot of bad eggs, you might want to compost them. It won't add much to the compost, except perhaps a lot of rodents.

Yeah, I think sell-by dates for eggs are basically only there because if there were no date at all, unscrupulous or absent-minded merchants would just keep the eggs on the shelf until they were sold, and eggs being eggs, there's really no way to tell just from looking at them whether they're bad or not. And, really, there's no reliable way for even the honest merchants to keep track of which eggs are older and which are fresher unless they have a date on them.

daninthedirt: One good test for an egg is whether it floats.

A floating egg means it's old, not necessarily that it's rotten. I think a good middle ground is to not use eggs that float as hard-boiled eggs--only use them in recipes that call for cracking the egg open, and always crack each egg into a separate "test" bowl first to verify it's ok before adding to a bowl/pot with other stuff in it.

I think that's true. An egg will float because the air sac is enlarged, but it may not be enlarged because bacteria is growing in it. It does mean that it's pretty old. By the same token, I've heard of rotten putrid eggs that handily sunk. So it's not an absolute test.

What I read is that if the egg lies flat (as flat as an egg can lie) it is fresh. If it stands up it is still OK, but not really fresh. If it floats it is bad. Nancy

jenkno: I always heard the for compost, animal matter should be avoided. With that, it seems to me that whole eggs would rot and become fetid for your plants.

Not really sure what "fetid for your plants" means. The main reasons why there's a general warning against composting animal matter isn't because animal matter is "bad" in and of itself but because animal matter and lots of other high-nutrient kitchen waste:

- will attract all kinds of undesirable pests and could attract neighborhood pets and sicken them

- will smell a lot worse than yard waste, creating an aesthetic issue for you and your neighborhood

- could contaminate your compost with E. coli, Salmonella, etc. if your compost isn't hot enough, which is not a direct hazard to your crops, but when you handle contaminated compost, you can contaminate your hands and your harvest with it

The composting of animal carcasses and residues left after butchering and processing is a thing that has been practiced for a long time and that ebbs and flows in popularity with farmers depending on the fluctuating costs of carcass disposal. There's nothing inherently "bad" about the resulting compost.

Nancy: What I read is that if the egg lies flat (as flat as an egg can lie) it is fresh. If it stands up it is still OK, but not really fresh. If it floats it is bad.

Eggshells are porous, so eggs lose moisture very gradually from the moment they're laid. As the egg dries out, more and more air ends up inside to replace the volume loss from evaporation. So older eggs will have more air inside => more air inside means the egg will float => eggs that float are more likely to be older eggs => older eggs are more likely to be bad => floating eggs are more likely to be bad.

However, it's just more likely. It's not a foolproof test for whether the egg is bad or not. It could be old but not yet bad.

An older egg will start to stand up in the water because the air in the egg is concentrated in a pocket called the "air cell" at the "fat" end of the egg, so that end of the egg is more buoyant and floats up first.

Some egg packers will coat the egg in a mineral-oil based sealant to help keep freshness in. That sealant also interferes with moisture loss through the shell. It's conceivable that some of these coated eggs could be old but behave like fresher eggs in water. And some of those might be bad eggs. So an egg that doesn't float might still be bad, though it's far less likely than the possibility that an egg that floats is bad.

I've heard about that sealant. That's why raw eggs last longer than hard cooked eggs, Because the boiling of the egg removes that sealant.

the sealant is removed when they are wash at processing plant.

The natural "cuticle" that the hen's body puts on it is washed at the plant. Some processers replace it after washing with an artificial sealant. If you buy eggs from a farmer's market, the natural cuticle may still be on the eggs.

I've done this, but not cracked it. Many years later, we were digging deeper into the garden bed and two cracked. Sooooo foul smelling. Not a good idea to put them in whole. Crack them first!

How do you make egg amino acids?

Preparation:

1. Place the eggs in a jar and pour lemon juice in it until the eggs are completely immersed.
2. Keep it for ten days with lid closed.
3. After ten days smash the eggs and prepare the solution.
4. Add equal quantity of thick Jaggery syrup to it and set aside for ten days.
5. The solution will then be ready for spraying.

This sounds like a recipe for a bacterial horde. Salmonella, citrobacter, alcaligenes, pseudomonas. You'll be growing all kinds of noxious stuff.

A whole egg is not going to provide any nutrient benefit for years! Egg shells are essentially a form of bone and will take years before they start to breakdown and decompose. If you want to use an egg for fertilization - I don't see why you would other than having a bunch of no longer edible eggs hanging round (fertilization benefit of these is minimal) - then crack open or shatter the egg before adding to the planting hole.

As noted, chicken eggshells are basically rocks that come out of chickens. Should you really need calcium, you won't dissolve any of it for a long time. Might as well use bones instead of eggshells. They have a lot of calcium. But it's the same issue. The idea that eggs or bones are good soil calcium supplements is wrong, and basically an old wives tale.

Well, it's been 12 years since the OP so the shells may have decomposed by now.

Maybe. Maybe not :-))

Might be on its way to becoming a Century Egg.

tj

"Well, it's been 12 years since the OP so the shells may have decomposed by now."

There is an odd affectation by posters here to resurrect archaic posts by gardeners who quite possibly are themselves already decomposed..

I tried placing whole eggs under my eggplant and got these results...

..........

I posted this one 7 years ago but it has been deleted....maybe for a good reason, nyuk

That's a good one. I'll have some scrambled eggplant. Maybe you end up getting some chickweed as well? Or henbit? Both edible and good!