Eggs!

First egg collected from hens hatched out in 2010.

Just this past week we collected the first eggs from the hens that hatched this past winter. Most of the young hens have settled nicely into the protected enclosure we built for them, and they've taken to laying their eggs in the new hen house we provided for them. This is good because it means that we get the eggs, the dogs do not get them.

Before we started collecting the young hens' eggs, I actually coughed up 29 cents for a dozen commercial eggs at Aldi's because I had lost track of where the older hens were laying. Since then, though, we discovered that the older hens have been laying in the feed bins in the barn stalls. Of course, the dogs have apparently known this for some time because when they get into the home pasture, they dash into whatever stall they can reach--whereupon they then devour whatever eggs they find. Now we collect those eggs but leave a few for the hens to set upon as they wish.

For breakfast the other day we broke both farm eggs and commercial eggs into a pan to scramble (with tumeric, onions, greens, and goat milk). I was struck by the contrast in color: where the farm eggs had rich orange-yellow yolks, the commercial eggs were pale, washed-out. They looked pitifully weak and it was hard to imagine them having the same nutrition as those from our hens here on the farm.

I could not imagine living again in the vacuum of suburban (or urban) life, without the gifts we harvest daily on our little farm.