When you grow cannabis seedlings to be later planted outdoors or transferred into bigger pots, eggshells are a viable alternative to small containers, party cups, or peat pellets. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a side-by-side comparison or anything. However, in our little experiment, the results were more or less the same as in our previous, more traditional grows.
Why Use Eggshells for Weed Plants?
Empty eggshells are great starter containers for young cannabis plants because they have the right size for this purpose, are guaranteed organic and non-toxic, are a common household item, and can be very conveniently kept in egg trays.
So, let’s take an egg and a cannabis seed, and see what will happen.
Weed Seeds in Eggshells: A Step-by-Step Instruction
Crack an egg as close to its ponty end as you can, empty it, and rinse inside. DO NOT try to remove the eggshell membrane. Otherwise the shell will be too brittle to handle. You can make a small hole in the bottom for drainage, but it’s optional.
Fill it with soil, pour about a tablespoon of water, stick a cannabis seed into the soil, with the pointy end down, and cover it with a pinch or two of more soil.
In a few days the seed will sprout.
Keep it under a light (a CFL will be just fine), trying not to let it stretch too much. In our case, the seedling stretched quite a bit by day 7.
What we did was we crushed the stem with the fingertips in several places, bent it and pressed to the surface of the soil (and later covered it with more soil).
Now the little plant is nice and short again, and you can keep it in the eggshell for several more days if you’re not ready for a transplant.
On day 11, we were ready to move the seedling from the eggshell to a more permanent home. Now we cracked the bottom with a teaspoon and removed the pieces of the shell, revealing the membrane.
Which we removed with pincers.
You can leave the sides of the eggshell intact or can break them further. It doesn’t matter because all the roots are only at the bottom, and the remnants of the eggshell will do no harm to the plant. On the contrary, the shell is chock full of calcium which plants could probably use later in the growing cycle.
Growing Cannabis in Eggshells Proved to be Very Convenient
If you grow several seedlings, eggshells placed in an egg tray are very convenient to work with. Especially under T5 lamps, but under CFLs, too. Just don’t keep your young plants in eggshells for too long, otherwise they’ll get root bound, and their growth will slow down. 7 days from sprouts should be enough. Transplanting them into the next container is also a breeze and a very low-stress procedure. By all means, try this method some time, especially if you like organic growing.
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