Growing tomatoes at home is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to create your own food. All they need is a little bit of attention and you’ll be blessed with a delicious crop ready to eat.
There are a number of tips to making your plants grow big and healthy, including making sure they’re planted in a spot with a lot of direct sunlight, or in a greenhouse if you’ve got one. They also need a lot of water to thrive.
But one gardening influencer has come up with a lesser-known trick to make your tomatoes grow as big and juicy as possible.
Influencer @hey.its.hod posts a lot of gardening and home-growing content on her social media channels – and one tip for growing tomatoes prompted quite a reaction. In the video the influencer can be seen placing a tomato plant in a bed in her garden.
But before she puts it in the soil, she cracks an egg into the hole she has dug for the plant. Speaking in the video, posted in May last year, she says: “Crack it, crush up the shell, throw it in. Crush up the shell, throw it in.
“I don’t know why it works, but it works. My tomatoes were, like, huge last year.”
In a follow-up video posted last week, the influencer, who describes herself as a “Girl Mama & Christian Wife”, said the original tip had prompted a flood of disbelievers and criticism, saying it “made everyone yell at me”. “No, it does not make racoons dig up my garden,” she said.
“It does not smell like rotten eggs in my garden. How does it work scientifically? I have no idea.”
She added: “The last two years I have done this trick my tomatoes have been perfect.”
But does this really work? While many gardeners know eggshells are rich in calcium and can have a number of benefits for gardening, using the entire egg is less common.
Bonnie L Grant of Gardening Know How said: “Eggs contain high levels of calcium,” reports GB News. “This is an important nutrient for plants, especially vegetables and fruits.
“Eggs will leach the calcium into the soil for root uptake during composting, which can conquer such problems as blossom end rot.” She added using raw eggs for fertilisation actually dates back centuries.
“Our grandparents didn’t have access to modern formulations for soil amendment and instead relied upon composting to boost soil fertility and tilth,” she said. “We can take a page from their book and learn how to reuse and give back to the soil naturally.
“A time-honoured tradition is to place raw, uncracked eggs in the bottom of the planting hole for tomatoes. It has its benefits and its drawbacks, as we will see.”
Bonnie noted that there is indeed a risk of smells and attracting local wildlife. Gardeners can avoid this by burying the eggs deep within the soil, however.
