No Egg Re-calls Here!

Meet the girls! L-R:
Beauty (Australorpe), Pepper (Silver-laced Wyandotte) and Goldie (Gold Star layer).

With all the recent media coverage of the massive outbreak

of human illness across the country due to contaminated eggs,

we are especially grateful for our girls!

Although we eat a primarily vegan diet,

we do use some eggs occasionally.

About a year and a half ago I decided to

"get some chickens."

The Treasure and I picked out six of them

at a local farm and ranch store...

they were such cute little fluff balls!

It has been a really enjoyable experience overall...

aside from the smell  of their excrement

if allowed to collect too long in one place,

and having to bury each of the three we have lost.

The-Man has the girls trained to jump into the "tractor" he made for them...
the LOVE going to pasture and gobble up the greens and bugs.
We often put them in weedy patches of the garden,
they eat down the weeds and scratch/till the ground.

We've learned a lot, and we have really enjoyed the eggs.

We love that the Treasure knows where those eggs come from.

(She spent a whole morning once, watching the hens,

and came bouncing in and announced,

"the egg just plopped right out of her bottom!

and mom, it was still wet!!")

Here's the chicken-yard. They roost at night in the old dog crate,
and the lean-to on the left shelters their feed and a nesting place.
Feed and scratch are housed in the metal trash can on the left edge of the photo.

 It is satisfying to know where our eggs come from,

and to have control of the living conditions of the birds that lay them.

We hope to get some more baby chicks next spring,

maybe we'll eventually be able to sell a few eggs.

Although the time may come soon when it is not safe to eat eggs

even from our own backyard flock due to disease,

for now we plan to keep our girls around.