Gunner wrote:
On Mar 11, 7:34 pm, "David Hare-Scott" wrote:
Billy wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Billy wrote:

Add pulverized egg shells (put in blender with some water) to your
lawn. Egg shells breakdown slowly, so you won't get a quick
response, but they will break down eventually.

Get serious. Ted already has enough goofy advice. If the lawn is
no bigger than 3m square and he has 5 years to wait this is a good
idea.

David

Explain your goofy response.

I appreciate your aim of re-use and recycle but in this case it isn't
practical.

How many eggs do you have to eat to get enough shell to spread on a
yard? Sure it depends on the size of the yard but we are talking
about some kilos of egg shell.

How fine can you grind it? Not very fine without a mill. Fine garden
lime or gypsum will take months to work, ground shell will be much
coarser and take years.

David- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Actually you can David, a quick method is to microwave them for a
minute to cook up the leftover liquid inside, put in a coffee grinder
dry...they powder up really well, but as you said, that is a lot of
eggs!

That may be of some use but I doubt that it is a fine as a high quality
garden lime. What we need to be sure is some measure of the grain size but
that is unlikely.

For those who are wondering what we are jabbering on about this is the
issue. Garden (agricultural) lime is calcium carbonate which needs to
dissolve in the water in the soil to be effective in either supplying
calcium or raising pH. The problem is that lime is only very slightly
soluble in water. Look at all those limestone and marble monuments (also
calcium carbonate) around the place, they last for thousands of years
(unless you get acid rain like the parthenon). The method of speeding up
the process is to grind it finely which increases the surface area and so
the rate of solution, even so it takes months to work. The degree of
fineness matters. Take a cube one centimetre on the edge, its surface area
is 6 sq cm. Grind it into grains 0.1 cm on edge, the surface area is now 60
sq cm, grind it finer to .01 cm on edge and the area is now 600 sq cm.

A new lime supplier started up round here who was cheaper than the rest.
The farmers who lime their pasture though this was great until they realised
that it was not as fine as the stuff they were used to.

David