Our Backyard Homestead

The Incredible Egg

I was a business major in college and adored my marketing classes.  For many years, I believed that the organic label on food was nothing more than a clever marketing scheme to get people to part with a few extra bucks to "feel" like they were making healthier choices.  I have since learned so much about our food supply and am certain that organic, whole food choices are worth every penny.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words so I thought I would post a little evidence in the matter.  The above picture is of eggs from two different sources.  The light yellow yolks are organic eggs from the grocery store.  The dark, orange yolks are what eggs should look like when a chicken is being cared for in the way they were intended to live.  Grocery store eggs, even organics, are from chickens kept indoors their entire lifetime.  Chickens were meant to be outdoors and roam for bugs and other little creatures.  Our chickens have even eaten small snakes they have found in the yard!

Right now, we are not getting enough eggs from our chickens to feed our family so I had to scout out a local co-op so that I could buy eggs from free ranging chickens.  As the picture clearly shows, the effort is well worth it!

If you have not already seen the movie Food, Inc. I highly recommend making the time to watch! 

Replenishing the Flock

We brought home 8 new chickens on Saturday.  2011 was a rough year to be a chicken in our backyard.  Our first year and a half we didn't have a single chicken tragedy but windstorms, hailstorms, and the hottest summer in Texas history made for lots of tears from sad kiddos!  We went from an even dozen chickens at the beginning of the year to only four that were with us to ring in 2012.  Here is hoping that our new flock fares a little better!

The new girls are supposed to be just 4-6 weeks from being ready to lay eggs.  Adolesecent chickens are such awkward looking creatures!

We set up our chicken fence to keep the new chickens segregated from the four hens we have left.  Our last batch of chicks had quite the wild tendencies and figured out how to fly over the fence quite quickly.

Of the eight wild chicks we added in the spring of 2010, Big Ben is the only one we have left.  She has finally relented on laying her eggs under the neighbors cedar tree. 

Of the original five that we started with in spring of 2009, we still have our three Barred Rock hens.  At three years of age (when hens typically cut down on egg production) they are still laying fairly reliably and have been the best chickens of the many varieties we have had.  Unfortunately, the farmer that we bought from did not have any Barred Rocks that were closer to laying age.

We ended up with seven Buff Orpingtons and one Americana.  It was our only choice if we wanted the older pullets.  We shall see how the Buffs measure up to the other breeds we have tried.  And even if they are a big flighty, who can resist the awesomeness of a blue egg from an Americana!!  I would have loved to have a few more of the colored egg layers, but maybe we will venture into chicks again so that we can pick the breeds that we prefer.

The Tornado guarding the new chickens that were transported home in cardboard boxes.  Oh how much we appreciated having a truck to transport them.  The first five came home in the back of the mini van and that was a stinky endeavor!  The next batch came to use by way of the US Postal Service as day old chicks.

The Garden Girl taking her box out to the backyard.  Is it obvious that it was QUITE windy on Saturday?

The Chicken Whisperer doing her thing with the chickens!  The kids have the other four hens trained to come back to the coop with barely a call.  I was quite amazed when I asked them to round up the chickens and they had them in the coop in a matter of seconds.  It might take a while before the new batch are trained this well!

 

"Mommy, can I put all of the eggs in one basket?"

I my wildest dreams, this was never a question I would have envisioned hearing from my six year old.  Oh how it makes me laugh that we have chickens, but how much fun they have been.  We did have a nice even dozen hens, however, we experienced our first chicken loss while we were out of town for New Years' and are down to 7 chickens now. 

I am quite sad to have lost my spring gardening buddy, Henny.  She was at the top of the pecking order, and one of our original five.  She would stay right by my side last spring while I was working new beds and planting, ready to gobble up any grubs or other bugs that I uncovered.  The other chickens were too fearful when I would turn over a new shovelful of dirt, but Henny was right there next to me with every move I made.

Last May we added eight new chicks to our bunch, of which, seven survived.  The new batch of chicks like to walk on the wild side.  Last August they decided that they were not fans of sleeping in their coop, they preferred to sleep on top.  Fortunately we did not have any predator attacks during the month or more that it took to get them moved inside the coop with the other chickens.

However, their "wild tendencies" continue on, which if not for the fact that we live in a neighbhood would be a good thing.  Industry has been hard at work breeding natural instincts such as sitting on their eggs to produce chicks, otherwise known as broody. out of chickens.  A broody chicken gets in the way of a large scale egg production operation. 

We currently have two of last May's chicks that have recently gone broody.  Now if we had a rooster, this would bring about a cute little batch of spring chicks.  However "Big Ben" our "rooster" turned out to be a hen and is currently one of the broody hens.  Big Ben has been a rebel from the beginning.  I am not sure "he" (as we still refer to her) has ever laid an egg in the nesting box.  She preferred hiding out, first, under my tomato plants in the fall and then when they disappeared, she moved on to the large cedar trees that line the edge of our property. 

At some point this winter, she rejected those trees and has moved to the cedar on the other side of our neighbors fence, right next to their carport.  Fortunately, they have not been too upset with her daily visits.  But now we have a new problem.  The chicken that has insisted in laying her eggs in the neighbors driveway is now broody and wants to sit on her nest in their yard all day!  Oh my, the problems I never expected to be solving in my lifetime!!

State of the Garden 7/28/10 part 1

It was such a nice evening that I just had to make a little journey out to the garden with the camera.  Today's harvest includes 1 cantaloupe (up to a total of 7 that we have picked!), 1 egg and 3 peaches from our peach tree planted this spring.  The chickens are on my "might become dinner list."  Please note, this is only said in jest.  I may or may not be serious, but my children might never speak to me again if we served up Henny or Penny for dinner.  Speaking of Henny, she will only lay her eggs in some random place in the garage.  Before we went on vacation it was under the tool bench.  We thought a week confined to her coop had cured her of her wandering egg laying ways, however, this week she is back to the garage...in a new and equally inconvenient spot of course! 

Most likely she is back to laying in the garage because Elsie, one of the black and white chickens, seems to have gone broody again.  Broody means that she wants to sit on her eggs.  This would be well and good if we had a rooster which we might in our new chicks.  We thought we had cured her of her broodiness prior to vacation as well, but all of the sudden she is queen of the nesting box this week.

The chicks are also on the naughty list as they have literally eaten every bit of my citronella plant.  Just 2 days ago it was a beautiful, huge plant!! 

Here are the chicks before devouring my plant!  They have gotten so big.

Hmm, I didn't plan for this to be a rant about the chickens!  But now I am out of time so I guess garden details and pictures will have to wait until tomorrow.  We just sampled the two peaches from the new tree.  AMAZING!!!  We are looking forward to hopefully a larger harvest of peaches next year.  Being the somewhat over the top researcher that I am, I had a terrible time deciding on what kind of peach trees to plant.  What a huge relief to now know that we picked some good ones!!

Our 90 Seconds of "Fame"

The video of our interview on WFAA has been pulled from their website, however, the print form is still available.  We were interviewed by Janet St. James in June 2010 about our personal food revolution and the impact that it has had on Matt as a physician.

Little did we know that the news clip would be picked up by other stations around the country and lead to two additional newspaper interviews, one with the AP and one with the Dallas Morning News.  Matt was also contacted by Jamie Oliver following the WFAA interview!

Click here if you are interesed in seeing the original interview.