My wife cannot imagine breakfast without eggs. Even with her awesome wheat, nut, blueberry pancakes, maple syrup, bacon and sausage, there still has to be an egg on top.
I cannot imagine a homestead without chickens. Even in a downtown tract home I had one. Now my flock is around 20.
I feed them organic, non-GMO because we expect to eat the eggs and want a healthy product. I also supplement with a bit of oyster shell calcium and ample grazing space. The girls love it. Our springtime egg production is up to over a dozen a day.
I will let a broody hen reproduce sometime this year to refresh the flock. After two years, production falls off rapidly, and half my flock is getting up there.
About the colors … they don’t make any difference in quality that we have noticed, but single-color production is soooo boring. Our flock is even more varied to look at than the eggs.
The numbers on the eggs, you ask? Date of collection. We eat the oldest ones first… about three days old by then. Compared to MONTHS with store-bought.
Our shells are thick and hard, the yolks dark and richly flavored compared to the blah, bland old factory farm eggs. Given the expense of organic, non-GMO feed, our eggs would be twice as expensive as factory farmed counterparts, but we don’t price it that way, do not even try to sell them. We give our springtime excess to friends and the Darby food bank.
Really fresh eggs do not peel well when hard-boiled, so we bought a dozen old factory eggs for a batch of deviled eggs. The differences were stark.
Yeah, we are spoiled. The chickens have it pretty good too.
