Egg Shells for Breakfast
by MrZebra on Jan.08, 2009, under The Animals
Egg shells make a good breakfast. Not for me, of course, but for the chickens themselves.
Chickens need grit in their diet so they can produce their egg shells. Without sufficient grit, they’ll produce soft shelled eggs – very strange and squidgy things. A useful source of grit for egg shells is – egg shells!
Whenever I use an egg, I place the broken shell into a bowl and save them until the bowl is full. (Don’t worry, they don’t smell bad.) Once I have enough shells, they are baked in the oven to sterilize them. I just put them in a roasting tin in the bottom whenever I’m cooking something else in the oven – or I leave them in the Aga if it’s on. When they have finished baking, I crush them by putting them in a carrier bag and beating them with whatever is to hand.
The crushed shells are mixed in with the chicken’s feed. They eat most of it, and it keeps their shells healthy and hard!
January 9th, 2009 on 9:27 am
Hi mr zebra,
Just read your blog. Well done for moving to the country, martin my husband and i would love to make the move to the country as we both hate the town/city life. Martin spent most of his youth on family farm in Ireland and would love that way of life again.
Good on ya for taking this route and hope you have every success.
by the way welcome to rm, i am the one that spends most of my time in the naughty corner, cant think why???
take care, you will find many friends on site and i am sure clunk will be glad to have another man aboard.
January 9th, 2009 on 1:32 pm
Hello Mrz.
Sometimes if the chickens haven’t had a nice ‘treat’ (cheese, rice, pasta) I make them up either a boiled or fried egg, eggshell and all, which always goes down very well. They get extra fat, protein and grit that way.
January 9th, 2009 on 2:32 pm
Our chickens seem to like their feed too much – so far they have turned their beaks up at anything else I’ve offered to them!
February 22nd, 2009 on 2:42 pm
Hi Mr Zebra,
Thanks for the tip – how long do they take to bake?
Kind regards
Sara from farmingfriends
February 22nd, 2009 on 3:02 pm
Hi!
They’re done in about 30 minutes. If I happen to be cooking fish & chips or something, then I’ll just put them in the oven at the same time. Otherwise, if I’m using the Aga for heating, I’ll just leave them in there all day.