Category: Eggs

True to her name, young Prima was the first of my spring chicks to lay an egg. This pretty little Black Copper Marans hen is one of the sweetest little ladies, and I thought it might be fun to revisit her brief life “from egg to egg.”

It seems like just yesterday that little Prima Georgiana Darcy was just a tapping sound coming from the inside of her dark brown egg. (Oh you laugh, but giving hens silly, prissy names is one of the great joys of keeping chickens.)

She emerged from her shell first on that cold February 26 and sprawled on the floor of the warm incubator, exhausted from the ultimate challenge of pecking her way out of the hard shell.

When she was finally rested, she set about helping her two brothers out of their shells. She pecked and pulled bits of shell to help them breathe, she peeped to encourage them, and when they finally broke from their shells she spread her fluffy little body out beside them while they rested from their effort. I have never before or since seen a chick appear to help other chicks hatch!

Two days later Prima appeared in a photo for this blog, perched quietly in RT’s enormous hands. While many black-colored chicks have white down, the light fluff is shed as they grow and they emerge as black adults.

Prima had distinctive markings around her eyes, but she also carried herself differently from the others and was much more placid by nature. The boys were sweet, but just a little more naughty and rambunctious.

Below we have Prima in our Easter Sunday photo session, then at 17 days of age. Female chicks will generally have smaller combs, even at a young age, and they will remain yellowish in color until they are nearly mature. The ladies will also have tiny or nonexistent wattles, the red flaps of skin that grow beneath the chin. Boys will have more prominent, reddish combs, and the wattles will begin to grow earlier. This little face is all girl:

My Black Copper Marans were the sweetest and most interactive of the chicks. They grew into an extremely awkward but very dear bobble-headed vulture phase that was precious! Below, Prima displays another “tell” of her gender: she tends to crouch instead of standing very proud and upright, especially in new situations.

And at last by around ten weeks my little vultures had grown into their first set of feathers. Here is young Prima (below, left) with her brother, enjoying a nice May afternoon outside with the other teenage chicks. Brother has already grown some of his copper coloring, and by this time the comb and wattle differences are very prominent. Prima would grow several more weeks until her head coppering would become noticeable.

And finally, just a week shy of five months old, Prima laid her first nice brown egg. It was a bit more speckled than the one from which she came, and it was about the size of a bantam egg. In the coming weeks the eggs will become larger and the color will even out.

And while the lovely poetic story of a hen from egg to egg is nice to share, I also have some comparative egg photos for those more scientific by nature. Here is Prima’s first egg compared to Dame Edna’s grown-up egg:

And another of Edna (top) and Prima (middle) eggs with a bantam egg (bottom) from Penny Pretty the bantam cochin:

Watching a tiny chick emerge from an egg - - or watching any creature being born - - is an awe-inspiring miracle to witness. Enjoying the privilege of caring for my little charges as they grow and mature has been a challenging, joyful, and humanizing adventure that is adding something to my life I had not anticipated. These little feathered friends provide me with great joy even as they provide food for our table on a daily basis. I would be hard-pressed to find a better or more useful pet for my suburban home.

Little Prima has grown from a tiny handful of fluff into a beautiful, copper-touched beauty with almond-shaped eyes right in front of us. I do not think I could ever lay my hands on another store carton of eggs, because now the story behind the egg is more important to me than ever before.

Beautiful prickly pear blossoms - - but watch those sharp spikes!

June is in full swing here in Middle Tennessee: as I drive through The Shire in the mornings, the landscape is awash in the kind of gorgeous, lush green that used to make my eyes hurt when I arrived on visits from dry, golden California years ago. The fields and sprawling yards are overflowing with flowers of every color, but in early to mid June the beautiful deep orange of our native Tiger lily dominates the color palette, accented with the delicate white, politely bobbing heads of Queen Anne’s Lace.

Delicate Queen Anne’s Lace

I have always loved the Tiger lily, and adding to its beauty is the plain fact that it’s a useful edible plant. Every part of this lily is edible, and you can find something of use in every season. The flowers can be picked clean of pistil and stamen, rinsed clean and eaten as they are or used as small wraps for other foods like fresh, cool tuna salad. Somewhere in my recipe collection are directions on using Tiger lily blooms to wrap a dish that was baked. The roots may be harvested in winter and eaten rather like potatoes or other tubers. For those interested in keeping land that will sustain you, the Tiger lily is a great choice—and it will naturally spread each year all by itself.

In a small corner of my yard sits an old bucket with a prickly pear cactus I dug from the yard to save our riding mower tires (and our feet!). This is another great Tennessee native plant that yields edible parts; the flat pads of the low-growing cactus may be peeled and prepared in much the same way as green peppers. My preference is to peel and chop them, sauté them lightly in a pan with a few veggies and incorporate them into a nice omelette as I used to have at a dusty old cafe in the dry California Salinas Valley many years ago.

Despite a late start this year, the vegetable garden has taken off. We already have more zucchini than we can possibly eat, and the crookneck squash is just starting to ripen. I imagine I’ll have to dredge up some creative ideas for preparing it this summer so we don’t get tired of it too quickly! The tomatoes will be late, but there looks to be plenty of fruit. We did not use the cages this year, so it remains to be seen whether the deer will take more than their fair share.

Young Louis XIV is growing bigger by the day - - and how about those lovely feathered feet?

My beautiful, rare booted bantam chicks are growing by the day. I have learned from experience now that self-hatched chicks are just friendlier than any I could buy from elsewhere. Having them imprinted on me—and handling them every day—makes for the sweetest, most trusting little chickens! The booted bantams will ride around on my shoulder, and my favorite little cockerel Louis XIV likes to just ride around with me all afternoon as I work in the yard. He rules from the throne of my shoulder, chirping away at all the other birds and issuing orders about his little kingdom. His father was quite a handsome fellow, so I expect great things from my little monarch. His namesake lived a long, productive life with plenty of female company, and I hope for the same for my Louis.

My young Australorp cockerel gives me a sideways glance as he struts on by

The first of my two black Australorp cockerels just went with his pullet to live at a lovely farmstead nearby. As much as I’d love to keep the last one (young Mick) as a young husband to my Dame Edna, I’m afraid that my suburban neighbors would not love him as much as I do—so off he will soon go to live on a farm in the country. I did not realize how hard it would be to sell off my chicks! I am so fond of them all, and I know each of them as individuals. This makes it quite difficult when the time comes for them to leave. This was the original plan—to gain the experience of hatching, to keep a few pullets for myself, and to sell the rest—but while moving along smoothly, the plan stings a bit. We’ll see how I feel about this next year.

Aunt Bea terrorizing half-blind Baby Mija: who knew short chickens could be so mischievous?

The rest of my girls are doing well. My three young hens are growing faster every day, and they spend their afternoons strutting around the yard like tall, sleek supermodels in a clique-ish huddle. Squatty little bantam cochin Aunt Bea still terrorizes my now-huge Baby Mija for some inexplicable reason. As little Bea breezes across the yard I can just see the look of horror on Mija’s poor, half-blind face; Bea seems to sense this, and she deliberately moves toward Mija just to get the chase going. The sight of a squatty, feather-footed bantam Cochin running across the yard after a full-grown chicken is something that must be seen to be appreciated; I really must get the video camera out one day and capture it.

Favorite, simple grilled summer supper

There is plenty of yard work to be done at this time of year so the place doesn’t start looking like a Heironymus Bosch painting; however, the extreme, unseasonable heat has made things slow going. Temperatures here have been in the mid to high 90s already, and nights are not much relief. By mid-afternoon on the weekends we are usually tapped out and ready to sit in the shade (or inside!) with a nice cool glass of Pinot Gris and just talk about yard work. RT will fire up the grill, and just to keep things simple we go to our old fall-back summer supper—steaks and fresh veggies, lightly salted and peppered and thrown right on the grill. Simple and no fuss.

One of the great early summer treasures here in the South are the sweet, delicious peaches. The real-deal peaches around here are only available for a few weeks to a month, and they are savored for the brief time they’re here. After our supper the other day, I whipped up one of my favorite peach desserts to enjoy out in the shade. I learned this recipe from a crazy pastry chef I used to know, and its delicious richness combined with the freshness of in-season fruit is absolutely spectacular.

Rich, sweet Amaretto Sabayon over fresh Georgia peaches: Heaven indeed

I started with fresh Georgia peaches, first washed and dried then carefully sliced into bowls. The Amaretto Sabayon was whipped up in a double boiler I made by using a stainless steel bowl over a pot of simmering water. We used fresh eggs from the hens, of course, and when the lightly foamy concoction was ready we spooned it over the peaches and sprinkled with some of our own freshly-picked blueberries. Perfect! I placed the “recipe” here on my website if you’d like to try for yourself.

Every season has so many beautiful things to savor, whether food, wine, good company, beloved animals, mysterious plants or any of the other million things I can think of that I so enjoy experiencing. What a treat to move through this world exploring it with all my senses! On warm June days like this, it feels like a (hot) playground custom-made for me.

Lovely Echinacea blooms in the patio garden

Does a chewed rose smell as sweet? You bet it does!

“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

- Emerson, Self Reliance

.
Spring 2009 in Jenotopia has been an unpredictable whirl of torrential downpours, office drama, dozens of chicks, busy family schedules and occasional chaos. Like the flooded earth outside, I have not found enough time for the quiet reflection needed to adequately absorb events and respond in a natural and meaningful manner.

We have nearly finished cleaning up the yard and gardens after weeks of heavy rain, and it is already clear that this gardening season will be very different from last year. Last year’s breathtaking cascade of roses has been replaced with thin, defoliated bushes and piles of brown-tipped, early-rotting blooms: those plants that escaped black spot and the Old-Testament-style host of insects had their blossoms spoiled by still more rain. Our vegetable garden was planted three weeks late, simply because the heavy rain made the ground like chocolate pudding - - too heavy for tilling and planting.

The chicken coops and runs were plagued by dangerous mold from all the rain and humidity, forcing daily cleaning with bleach and lots of shoveling. Even the brooder chicks felt the effects of the weather, being forced to stay indoors instead of playing outside in the health-giving sunshine in the afternoons. I had some initial trouble locating buyers for some of my older chicks, resulting in a bit more crowding than I would have liked. And most unfortunate of all, we had to put down two chicks for unrelated issues, one for severe deformities and one, tragically, for illness related to his digestive system.

My beautiful Skye - - tragically lost to us

Dear, sickly chick begs the question of why there is suffering among little ones

I write all this only to say that now that I have time to reflect on the season’s happenings, I find a general current of dissatisfaction underlying my perception of things. When I look around and see chewed roses and mucky gardens, sick pets and stressed families and piles of paperwork and a messy house, I realize I am comparing these things to an ideal I have in my head - - an ideal of perfection.

So what is perfection, this thing at the source of my unease? –And more importantly, can I have it surgically removed?

A Western philosopher could take the predictable route through Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas and others who follow and interpret the concept of perfection through religious lenses as it relates to mankind and his environment - - and his God. Mathematicians, chemists and those of the scientific ilk may take refuge in quantifications of perfection that may be calculated or measured. Perfection in art further complicates the philosophical picture, now elevating the question to throbbing Jenotopia headache status.

I will reserve the headache-inducing philosophical arguments for my unfortunate family and nearby friends, then, and suffice with this: I finally realized I have perpetuated my own sense of unease and dissatisfaction by maintaining a personal idea of perfection that is flawless, spotless, glossy, improbable, and not in keeping with the glorious, overgrown chaos of reality in which I live. In my mind’s eye I saw velvety, flawless roses in a beautifully-manicured garden; weather that responded to my every whim; customers who called when I wanted them to and purchased my birds without question; a house that magically maintained itself; and a family that constantly read my mind and did whatever I wished. By maintaining this exercise in fantasy, my eye became trained to miss the unscrubbed uniqueness and beauty that is all around me!

Remember those chewed roses I mentioned? They sufficed quite well for the bees, and in the mornings and evenings their heavenly perfume still fills the air when I am out in the yard.

The soppy, late vegetable garden? We tilled and planted it just fine once the rain ended, and we now have lovely brown rows of earth with all sorts of vegetables peeping out and blooming. The soil texture is now the best it has ever been.

New rows of plants and sleeping seeds: late but still viable

The moldy, wet chicken coops? They are drying out, and the hens come out and flap their wings in hearty satisfaction when they see the morning sun rising behind the maple trees.

The overcrowded chicks? My handsome, noisy young roosters have all been sold off to live with their own harems of lovely ladies, and I have three beautiful young pullets growing into very fine laying hens. Fall in Jenotopia will be chock-full of blue and dark brown eggs!

Nick struts around . . . in the kitchen??

We miss you already, Big Rosie

Farewell, Apollo and Daphne

Pretty young pullets

And my family? They are as loving as ever, and those who need to are stepping in to support those in need. The children are growing into beautiful adults, we adults are learning what is important in life, and we are all growing wiser and more appreciative of each other.

And how about that job? Back at the office my paperwork ebbs and flows but never really goes away, but as I watch friends and acquaintances struggle with layoffs and life changes while I enjoy abundance, I realize just how fortunate I am to remain insulated against many of the changes going on in the world around me. I have goals and dreams for the future path of my life - - but while out in the garden on a sunny Saturday morning snipping plants and enjoying the sounds of the girls clucking away, I am filled with the silent knowledge that in its own funny way my life is complete right now - - in all its unvacuumed, bug-chewed, feather-strewn glory.

What is perfection, then? I won’t presume to argue with the great philosophers or mathematicians or spiritual leaders, but for me perfection is that which is sufficient unto itself. It lacks nothing: it is harmonious, a state of completeness. It is not a static, unchanging ideal: it reflects the beauty and power of the objects and individuals I encounter - - all of whom are complete, yet ever-unfolding into their unique potential.

I am looking forward to another perfect summer.

RT holding tiny Black Copper Marans chick

By this time of year it seems that spring will never come to Middle Tennessee. The landscape is an endless wash of grey, and every tease of warmth is quickly followed by chill winds and bleak winter rain. We even had snow again last weekend, brought along on an icy northern cloud that whipped through the state in a matter of hours and left one to ten inches of white in its wake. Now, the southern winter weather is by no means a competitor for the Buffalo-Rochester winters of my early childhood, but the cold grey days add up for all of us and make us wonder when spring will begin creeping over the landscape to bring us some green relief.

All is not lifeless and asleep, though: all across the countryside tiny new lives are arriving, harbingers of the coming season. In mid-February I made my third visit to Bonnie Blue Farm to witness kidding season in all its glory. The weather made its usual ups and downs during my stay, but nothing stopped the lovely ladies from their business of bringing tiny newborn kids to the farm.

Kidding season is a busy time for a working goat dairy. Along with the daily tasks of milking, feeding and caring for fifty goats; creating delicious, fresh cheeses and getting them to market comes the added responsibility of tending to new mothers and their young. But before the kidding comes the waiting . . .

Sugar waits for her goat kids to be born

Goat does do not always cooperate with their scheduled due dates. They also do not coordinate kidding times with other farm tasks. This means plenty of watching and waiting, and just when you think things are going to quiet down - -

“Mind if I nibble on your ear?” –Healthy young Nubian twins

Surprise!

I was fortunate to witness the births of two sets of beautiful Nubian goat twins, each with one buckling and one doeling. Luckily, both births went quickly and uneventfully. As any farmer can tell you, though, things do not always go smoothly, and farming with animals has its share of tragedies. Like Life itself, though, Bonnie Blue Farm moves through the beauty and tragedy of kidding season in its own mysterious rhythm, and even suffering and death have their time and season.

Young Saanen doelings in motion

The Jenotopia household has been full of excitement as well: we have tiny chicks hatching in new incubators, and we now have two brooder cages of babies basking and playing under heat lamps. The little fellow in the top picture of this post came into the world on February 26 with a tiny peck from inside his dark brown egg:

Marans chick pipping, February 26

As chickens approach Day 21 of their incubation, they will move into hatching position facing the large end of the egg. During this time they pierce the air cell at the end of the egg, and you can begin to hear them peeping from inside the egg! Next comes the “pip”—the chick makes a sharp peck in the shell itself and samples outside air for the first time. Usually the chick rests for several hours while it converts to pulmonary respiration and finishes absorbing the last of the yolk sac.

When it is ready, the chick will then start “zipping” the shell by making a line of pecks at beak level, turning inside the shell and continuing the line until it can pop the bottom of the shell open in a heroic effort that exhausts all its energy.

Tiny newborn Marans chick lies exhausted after hatching

The tired, wet chick will rest again and then begin to crawl around and learn to use its tiny muscles. A few more short hours will find a fluffed chick wobbling around looking for its siblings!

Our new chicks have already grown quickly, with the first batch of Ameraucana chicks over three times the size of its week-younger French Marans neighbors.

Lovely group of buff Ameraucana chicks at two days, February 21

The chicks will begin growing feathers on their tiny wings first:

Tiny wing feathers already beginning to grow at four days of age

And in another week we may be able to start telling the difference between the pullets and cockerels (girls and boys). The Ameraucana females will lay blue-tinted eggs when they are all grown up, about five months of age or so. Whether they are male or female, though, they are sure to be beautiful!

.

I have seen forty spring seasons come and go, and no matter how well I think I understand the ebb and flow of Life I continue to be astonished by it. The act of witnessing the miracle of newborns entering this world still renders me a little child – tongue-tied, helpless, awestruck at the precious fragility and amazing resilience of tiny lives taking their places in the Great Circle. I am humbled by the Miracle whose spark I still cannot explain, though I have read hundreds of thousands of pages of science and math and philosophy and religion.

I enjoy my great privilege of welcoming these little ones into the remains of another Tennessee winter, and I know that very soon now the daffodils will unfold in the front yard, and the first tinge of green will creep across the landscape. The rest of the migratory birds will return to build nests, and the night air will be filled with the sound of frogs at the creek. The chicks and kid goats will scamper and play and grow, warm summer will be here before I know it, and that sweet rhythm of Life will roll on in its beauty and mystery while I hang on, childlike, and enjoy the ride.

.

What? . . .

If you would like to know more about where I purchased my Ameraucana eggs, please visit talented breeder and regional Ameraucana Breeder Club Director Jean Ribbeck at http://home.sprynet.com/~rribbeck/ .

If you would like to read more about chickens, have questions about poultry health, want to find other poultry enthusiasts, or wish to find rare or unusual birds for sale, I highly recommend the wonderful Backyard Chickens Forum, http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/index.php .

If you are in Tennessee and would like to find out where to find award-winning Bonnie Blue Farm cheeses – or perhaps even visit the farm and stay in Gayle and Jim’s lovely guest cabin, visit http://www.bonniebluefarm.com/ .

I love my chickens. How I have enjoyed their interactions and antics! I know this may sound silly to seasoned ranchers and farmers, or even slick city dwellers who never wake up to the heady mix of English roses and chicken poop in the morning garden. I certainly wouldn’t trade it for the sterile suburban yard I once had. Boring! I would much rather trip over an ocean of potted plants and hay bales, empty wine bottles and feed sacks and dogs and chickens. I would also much rather cook up a still-warm egg from my own coop than lay my hand on a carton that came from a battery farm. Am I perfect? Have I managed to avoid damaging the world around me in any way? No and no. (Is that even possible?) But what I am is on a kooky path toward some sort of imaginary hybrid self-sufficiency that will hopefully integrate my suburban life with something . . . more. And it’s fun! Come on, chickens on the patio? Good, good stuff. Sweating in the vegetable garden is good stuff, too: it surely beats sitting in front of the TV all evening.

Hey, there’s a chicken in my back yard!

Details of my tiny life aside, it’s hard to miss the clues that there is an enormous change rumbling over the country ~ a change in how we look at the food we eat, and a new consciousness of where it comes from. There is a wide variety of opinion on just how to conceptualize our place in the Food Circle, but I have to say today’s Slate article on urban chicken keeping surprised me ~ not for the content of the article, but on the vehemence of the comments left in its wake. I suppose if you speak about slaughtering animals you are bound to wake up strong feelings in most folks, but the hostility between rural and urban, vegetarian and carnivore/omnivore was palpable, and I saw no useful dialogue between camps. (That’s probably what I get for reading the ‘comments’ section of a web article instead of visiting a university discussion, but still!)

There were a lot of strong opinions flying around in the ether, but no one seemed to have recognized the core of the urban and suburban farming/homesteading movement: modern urban and suburban people who have been so very insulated from the gritty, sweaty, bloody, sometimes-unpleasant aspects of farming and meat consumption are becoming AWARE of their insulation, and some are choosing to participate in the process by experiencing those aspects of life themselves. They are not obligated to do this, there is no real reason they must do this, and it is certainly not a necessity for the average person in order to survive in modern America. People from all over the country are simply awakening with a desire to be respectful, Conscious Omnivores.

Lovely home-grown eggs from spoiled suburban hens

The new urban Conscious Omnivores are rookies to farm life. They are new to the game, they are sometimes clumsy at it, and they approach farming and animal husbandry with an entirely different viewpoint than someone coming from generations of ranchers and farmers. (I have never known a farmer to lie awake at night dwelling on the single chicken he or she killed for supper the day before ~ or to spend weeks researching the most painless methods of killing.) The point is, though, that these urbanites want to participate. They know it would be easy to pick out that shrink-wrapped steak from the meat section of the grocery store, but something inside them is beginning to look behind the transaction for something more meaningful. COs might not even know any farmers ~ some have never seen a farm up close before. Yet still people by the thousands are beginning to teach themselves how to live off the land in whatever ways their tiny plots will support. Those who have learned teach others through web forums and chat boards, farmers markets and interest groups; some experienced farmers and ranchers have even gotten into the game and offered their valuable experience to the Starbuck’s-drinking city folk who desperately want to feel connected to the land.

The pleasure and pain of delicate seedlings

Once immersed in their new urban farm lives, professors and artists and computer technicians are suddenly faced with activities that challenge their oft-conflicting belief systems in ways they have never encountered before. They are forced to begin sorting out their thoughts on life and death and nature in ways the experienced farmer takes for granted, and this sorting can sometimes be a bumpy (or even traumatic) process. The desired end goal for most of these urban pioneers, though, is an integration of action with belief system so that ~ finally ~ both are congruent.

How do I know what the modern Conscious Omnivore is thinking? I am one! I have not yet incorporated consumption animals into my tiny 1/3-acre operation, but I have lived my life among hunters and have been imprinted with the importance of respect to animals and nature. There is a lot more I could say about the issue of vegetarianism versus meat consumption, or even the relative morality of mindless, casual slaughter versus conscious, humane versions of the same act (Is there a difference? Who’s to say?). I will leave these hot debates to your dining room tables and web forums, and suffice with this: what strikes me as so important ~ even critical ~ is that the debate exists. People are thinking about their food consumption, and they are thinking about this issue within the larger context of their place in the world, in society, and most importantly, in nature.

And so, to all the rookie urban and suburban small farmers and Conscious Omnivores out there, I salute you! You could recline in the comfort of your air-conditioned living rooms, but instead you chose to widen your understanding of your place in this marvelous world in which we live. Whether you have a five-acre suburban mini-farm or just a few potted tomato plants on your apartment patio, I heartily encourage you to follow your instincts and allow your journey toward semi-self-sufficiency to unfold in its own mysterious way.
.

The Unfolding

.
Here are a couple of folks I admire, who bravely share their successes and failures in their own return to farming and homesteading.

Irish Sally Garden
Rebecca in Ireland shares her first chicken slaughter experience, and describes her family’s new-found appreciation for their meal: http://sallygardens.typepad.com/sallygardens/2008/02/my-first-chicke.html

Also from this blog is a great posting on sustainability ~ http://sallygardens.typepad.com/sallygardens/2008/03/what-is-sustain.html

Hedgewizard’s Diary
Hedgewizard in Britain openly shares his first experience slaughtering his own chicken: http://hedgewizardsdiary.blogspot.com/2008/04/chicken-weekend-part-1.html

.