Seed Starting – Make your own seed-starting trays out of eggshells

Juliet ♦ April 23, 2012 ♦ 2 Comments

If you are careful cracking them to only open the tip end, you can save the eggshells from your daily cooking for use in seed starting.  Make sure to rinse them!  Just set them aside until you have enough to start enough seeds for your early spring planting.

As you can see, they can add up quickly.  Why throw them away when they can serve a valuable purpose?  Seed starting trays can add up, but these egg shells would have just been trash or compost.  While you’re gathering enough, find and save some items that will be helpful for holding your little seed starters.  I have used empty foam egg cartons and also a mini-muffin pan.  Keep an eye out for these mini-muffin pans at the dollar store too.

Before filling with dirt, use a pointed object like a barbeque skewer to pierce a hole in the bottom of the shell from the inside.  This allows drainage.  Be gentle, as this will weaken the shell quite a bit.

Fill your eggshells with good soil, either a starter mix or potting soil; just whatever you have available should work fairly well for this purpose.  The kids love to help with this part.

Plant your seeds according to the package directions.  Water them well, but gently, to completely saturate the soil inside the egg.  You don’t want to leave standing water in there, but you want the soil good and wet.  LABEL YOUR SHELLS!  You don’t want to forget which shells contain which type of seeds.  This is easily accomplished with a permanent marker on the outside of the shell.

Place your shells in a warm place for germination.  A sunny window is a good spot so the seedlings get good light as soon as they emerge from the soil.  Soon you’ll have little baby seedlings popping up and eager to enter your new garden when its time.

When it is time to transplant the seedlings, I prefer to gently crack the shell, by squeezing, so the roots can escape more easily.  Then I plant the entire seedling and broken egg shell together to help add extra nutrients for plant growth.