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Intro and chicken grit . . .

Hello all,
I don't think I've introduced myself yet; although I've been reading this
list for quite awhile and learning quite a bit.
I've been gardening as my main hobby for about 12 years, or for a
lifetime if you count helping my mother out with her houseplants, mowing
the lawn, and growing watermelons in the summer.
Until this year, my gardening efforts were on a small scale, restricted
to a few small beds and a patio, which I filled to the brim with
perennial flowers, herbs, and eventually vegetables too.
I love wild-type, hardy perennials and herbs, old favorites such as
Shasta daisy, Rudbeckia, Echinacea, Columbine,
thyme, sage, violets, primroses, snapdragons, etc. Although I like 
interesting and
unusual plants too, my criteria is that they need to beautiful and tough.
I'm in the slow throes of establishing a kitchen garden, flower beds, and
woodland shade garden.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, smack dab in the middle of the
Willamette Valley in Oregon, zone 8, where we supposedly can grow just
about anything.
My question is about the use of chicken grit I keep seeing mentioned here
for
growing seedlings. As this is my first year growing many different plants
from seed (tomatoes to hibiscus to potatoes to daylilies), I'm definitely
a novice and can use all the advice I can get. In the past, I've had good
luck with herbs such as sage, oregano, and rosemary. If it's too
complicated or
time-involved, I won't do it. This spring, I've successfully started
tomatoes and
green peppers on a hot pad in vermiculite, lettuce and spinach in a soil
mix in a cold frame, and the perennial flower seeds out in the garden are
coming up (along with the marigolds and cosmos left over from last
summer). Why use chicken grit? What's its purpose?

Thanks in advance (one, for reading all the way through this; two, for
your kind help).
-Amy K.
P.S. I'm going to check out the sowing Web page right now!
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