At Dragonwood Farm, we sell eggs.  Pretty pretty eggs, inside and out.  Except when we don’t, which is pretty much from mid-October until around the middle or end of January.  This confuses people sometimes, because most other farms around here continue to stock the local food co-ops with eggs, so why doesn’t Dragonwood?

Demonstration of proper safety procedures with Dragonwood poultry.

The answer is tied up in another aspect of Dragonwood’s egg production… our happy, free-range chickens.  The sticker on our egg cartons says “truly free-ranging happy chickens”, and we stand by that.  More than once, a customer has looked at that claim and asked “How do you know whether they’re happy or not?”  The answer’s not all that easy to fit in a nutshell, so let’s try a long blog post instead.

This redhead is a happy chicken.  That’s her little coop in the background, our Chick School, where we raise our free-ranging chicks.  She’s an Auracauna pullet, about 3 months old, and just about ready to be moved out of the chick coop into her new home, one or the other of our two big coops.

Chick School is our boarding school for chicks.  It’s a safe place, with an elevated chick home (so we can see under it and they can hide under it) and about 500 square feet of netting-covered outdoor classroom for learning to free-range.

She’s been free-ranging by day since she was just a few days old… after about 2-3 days on our porch in a box, we move them into the Schoolhouse with a brooder lamp hanging from the ceiling that allows them to adjust their temperature at night (closer = warmer: these are autosensing, autoadjusting smartchicks, no thermometers needed).  During the day they run around in the outdoor classroom scratching and nibbling and learning about bugs and seeds and grasses and lamb’s quarters.

Mrs. Buff and Puff perch at the schoolhouse door with some of their younger charges.

The school has two full-time teachers.  Mrs. Buff is Head Schoolmistress, she’s a big Buff Orpington hen, and her assistant is a half-pint black bantam hen named Puff.

These two rule the roost, take the attendance rosters and above all else keep their eyes out for trouble.  Especially hawks flying overhead.  These two are dedicated teachers, and they run a tight ship, nobody gets out of line.  Very often.

Unless I come into the yard.  We two-legged folk are welcomed and shunned at the same time.  We are known for our largesse (local mill chicken feed in the morning, garden greens and the occasional grasshopper or tomato hornworm at odd moments throughout the day), but also for our attempts to herd and scoot them out from under the schoolhouse at dusk and into the schoolhouse for the night.  Peep!  Squawk!  So they jitter back and forth between running to us and away, many times a day.

Pullets and meat birds, free-ranging in the extended campus at Chick School. Extended campus has no net covering, but is fenced to keep them out of our lettuces.

During the morning feed, I always try and feed thems that wants to by hand.  I get a small crowd who prefer eating out of my hand to picking it up from the ground or the feeders.  And in every crowd there’s one or two who like the daily contact more than normal… and that’s how this happened.  Two days ago she hopped onto my back and perched on my shoulder and then clambered down onto my forearm and ate from my hand.  Today, in the rain, she started eating from my hand with everyone else, then I watched her leave my hand and walk around behind me.  Sure enough, up onto my back again, but then Hey! up another notch.  Glad I have my dad’s old shit-resistant Elmer Fudd on.  After a minute or two (and after the self portraits), since she wasn’t getting any food up there, I saw her upside down face peering in at me from my hat’s bill.  I bent down again and she hopped down and ate from my hand again with everyone else.

So that’s part of the happy chicken answer.  There’s a lot more to it though, and it helps answer why we have no eggs to sell, so I’ll keep going.

WHY MY HENS NO LAY?

It’s common in the chicken egg farming business to maximize egg production in several ways.  I’m not going to belabor the “what does free-range really mean?” question here… our chickens truly live out of doors, foraging for much of their daily caloric intake, mostly only going inside to lay eggs in the nesting boxes or get a cool drink or to roost at night.  But even farmers with great free-ranging practices still push their chickens hard to maximize egg production, because if the hens don’t lay, ya get no pay!

Hens want to follow a seasonal pattern for their laying that’s based mainly on the length of daily daylight, and to a lesser extent on temperature. In addition, after a hard season of laying eggs, chickens molt… for a period of a couple months they lose most of their feathers, lose a good bit of weight, and internally and externally have a rejuvenation period that gets them ready for a new laying season.

So a flock as a whole lays the most eggs in the spring and early summer (increasing day length),with peak egg production before the summer solstice, and then gradually declines toward laying the fewest eggs during late fall and early winter.  For our hens, that means egg production falls from about 50+ eggs per day (from 80 or so hens) in May to only about 5 eggs per day (2-8 daily range) in late October til early January.  But since the winter solstice is quite early in what we call “winter”, we see an uptick in the ladies laying by early January.  By late January we’ll be back up over a dozen eggs a day (enough to sell a few dozen each week) and rapidly rising from there, even though it’s damn cold out there.  The days are getting longer! Let’s lay!

A molting Speckled Sussex. Whatta you looking at?

But a lot of farmers seem to feel this long resting period is unnecessary.  And this whole molting business, can’t modern agriculture do something to fix that too?

Length of day solution:   Let them have light!  The solution seems easy enough… they want light? Give them light!  By turning on lights in the coop, and carefully adjusting the length of “day” for hens, farmers can shorten the downtime and get more eggs out of the ladies.

Molting solution:  Force them all to molt at one time.  Hens don’t all molt at the same exact time, so a given flock will have a lengthy downtime, even with artificial lighting.  A common practice for decades on commercial farms is to withold food in the autumn to starve the chickens and stimulate the molting to start.  Yep.  Starve them, no rations for a week or more.  It’s not a pretty thought to most of us.

There’s another way to minimize or eliminate completely the molting problem.  And that’s to sell “stewing hens”.  It works like this:

1.  In the late-summer or fall, you divide your existing layer in half: keep the best layers, get rid of the lesser half.  Cull and sell these birds as “stewing hens”.

2.  You replace the culls by purchasing ready-to-lay pullets in the early fall (or raise them yourself, from eggs laid four-five months previous).

3.  Thus while the existing flock molts, the new hens take up the slack, giving you eggs to sell during the winter (do keep those artificial lights on, though).

4.  In the spring you’ll have the older birds starting their new laying cycle as the pullets slow down.  Keep track of who’s who because then…

1. Repeat the cycle by culling the older birds and the weaker of the last year’s new hens.  Replace with more new pullets and keep it going.

So… you never have any birds older than about 18-20 months (two cycles of laying with one molt).  You only keep birds while they’re at their most productive.  And you sell eggs all year round.

The Dragonwood Happy Chicken Way

Puff and a youngster, inside the schoolhouse.

For us, molting and winter downtime is just part of the life cycle of our ladies.  We don’t do any of those stimulation tactics up there!  Oh, on a really cold winter night we might turn on a heat lamp… we have done that a few times, but just for the warmth.   We feel that artificially stimulating the hens to lay more eggs than their bodies tell them to probably shortens their lives, and that’s not what we’re aiming for.  We know our older birds can keep laying daily right up until the last few weeks of their lives… we’ve watched it happen.  They molt when they want to molt, and they take as long as they want to doing so.

We raise new birds every year, putting them through rigorous training with Mrs. Buff and Puff.  This year enrollment was roughly 20 from chicks we hatched (here’s Puff with one of her younguns) and 30 more from chicks we purchased, plus another 30 meat birds that graduated early (yum).  Then after graduation we integrate the new pullets with our existing flocks.  We lose up to a dozen or so birds each year from predators, and another dozen or two that die from natural causes.  So far our flocks have grown a little each year, and our oldest hens and one rooster are more than five years old now, and still laying (the roo lays hens, not eggs).  The pecking order in each flock fluctuates a bit when we integrate new birds into them (from Chick School’s graduating class), but the social order survives and life in the coop goes on.

We feed them well, give them a lot of freedom (one flock has it’s own pasture, the other its own woods), and let them feed us in turn.  What eggs we don’t eat ourselves are sold to friends and market shoppers who value darn good food.  In fact, that’s the real nature of Dragonwood Farm.  We grow food that we like to eat, and share what we grow with others.  We try to grow it all with love and care, from the choices we make with our soil and land to the very headgear we wear (photo at top).  Our goal is to have truly happy chickens, because that makes us happy.  That’s why we’re here, and you’re welcome to share with us.  But not til after solstice.  Hang in there another couple months.

“The people who give you their food give you their heart.” - Cesar Chavez

Postscript: In case it’s not perfectly obvious from reading this post, the Dragonwood way is not the most cost-effective way to produce eggs.  We feed lots of chickens for months of non-production!  But we end up with some of the very tastiest eggs from some of the very happiest chickens around.  At a price that’s affordable when you want really good eggs. See you in the spring!

These three heralds of winter’s end are here, and have been keeping us busy for the last month!

Seed starting, maple syrup making, and egg collecting all burst out of the depths of winter at about the same time.  Although, we didn’t really have any “depths” of winter around here this year!  The mild weather I complained of in January continued right on through for the most part, and brought about an oddly early maple sap run in the last couple weeks of January, of all things.

Collecting sap, scrounging wood, cutting and stacking wood, nursing the fires, and boiling down and processing the syrup kept us up late nights off and on throughout February.

Sometimes, in critical times of a big sap run, we set our alarms to go off every few hours through the night, and got up to feed the fire under the reducing sap.  Once, I got called out at 3:30 am to a birth, and P just got up along with me and stayed up to keep the sap boiling. 

More than once, we finally completed and canned the finished syrup around midnight, because that’s when it was done.  Leaving for work in the morning, and getting home after 6pm mean catching up on farmwork after dark.

Soon after the days start getting longer and the light comes back, the chickens start laying again after the winter break that most of them take.  But they seem sensitive to cold as well as light, and their egg-laying only really has a burst of speed when the days start to warm above freezing, same as maple sap.  So I always associate maple sap running with the hens laying - bringing in a daily bounty in egg baskets and sap buckets.  Both were unusually early this unusually warm winter.  We’ve started our local egg sale deliveries again, as well as supplying eggs to Selma Cafe.

And, it’s seed-starting time.  I love the process of watching next summer’s plants start off from the tiniest sprouts.  It’s incredible to me that a frail little sprout becomes a giant bunch of celery, or that bushels of tomatoes come out of just the few seeds you can hold in the hollow of a cupped hand.

So far, we’ve got leeks, onions, celery, celeriac, multiple kinds of peppers, eggplant, and various early greens started under lights near the woodstove, or out on the sunporch. 

I’m not counting chickens before they hatch, I’m counting eggs as they’re laid.  It’s less than a fortnight past solstice, and already the egg count is starting to rise.  No, we’re not getting dozens a day yet, and it’s not enough to put out the newsflash bulletins for everyone to start putting orders in for eggs.  But it’s definitely an uptick and numbers, and the color mix of our daily eggs has changed.

Maybe it’s just the excessively warm spell we’ve had this December, and not the passing of solstice at all.  It’s definitely clear though that some of our layers are back after their molt… we haven’t see a blue or green Auracauna egg for a month now, and in the last three days two of the Auracaunas have started laying again, nice big eggs.

We love how big the eggs are from the older birds.  We love having older birds around, actually, and not just because their eggs are among our largest.  Our two flocks have great leadership, both from the roosters and the hens.  A couple months ago now we took the thirty or so new pullet hens and their roos from their chick-to-pullet-coop and split them up and introduced them to their permanent flocks… the new Welsummers went west to the bigger flock, and the Cuckoo Marans to the east flock.

Having older birds and a stable flock/coop situation allows newcomers to settle in quickly.  There’s some initial confusion and a bit of put-you-in-your-place pecking, but that’s why it’s called a pecking order.  New birds come in near the bottom of the order, and work their way into a comfort zone.  Everybody finds a place, and within a short time, everybody knows everyone else and things are fairly settled socially.

Brunch with friends in the snow.

I read once that 50-60 birds in a chicken flock is about the most that they can handle well, because more than that and their little chicken brains can’t keep track of the social structure and civilization breaks down.  We haven’t pushed the upper limits of that range too much;  our west flock is around 70 right now.  But it’s very clear that everyone knows everyone else, and they all understand the pecking order.  So I think the maximum reasonable Facebook friendslist for chickens could actually be much higher, given a comfortable coop and roosts at night and plenty of room for free-ranging during the day.  Not such teeny chicken brains after all.

Back in November, there were three Barred Rocks from the east side flock that refused to stay in their fenced pasture, and kept escaping to greener pastures.  The west flock has better fences, so after a week or so of this, we simply took the lead escape artist and carried her back to the west flock, setting her on a perch after dark so that in the morning, she’d find the new water, food and “friends” before setting out for the day’s foraging in new territory.  We’ve found this a pretty reliable way to introduce birds to different flocks, that they always seem to find their way back to the coop after waking up there.

Two more escape artists headed for the West Flock.

In the morning at roll call, the escape artist found she’d fallen a few notches (plummeted, more like) and needed to find her new place.  Everyone in the West Flock knew this was someone different and yet someone who could belong here.  There were no death struggles, just don’t-stand-so-close-to-me messages and minor display-fight skirmishes.

Our wild/tame Tom turkey (who lives outside the flock in the trees, but spends all day with the west flock chickens) knows instantly who any newcomers are and quietly chases them around the hen yard, walking along with his long strides causing them to hop and run a little and behave themselves.  After an initial chase, Tom leaves the newcomers alone most of the day unless they get into skirmishes (which they do).  He’s our cop, breaking up all the fights, or trying to by sticking his head in and getting between skirmishers and *peenting loudly at them.  I don’t think the peenting does much, it’s not a very threatening sound, but he’s getting to be so massive that he’s definitely imposing.  He takes this job seriously, always picking out who he thinks is the troublemaker and targeting him/her specifically for little snakelike jabs with that big head of his.  So the newcomers learn fast to work their way up the ranks gradually, and not set off The Big Guy too much by being too much the social climber.

And it works.  We have happy flocks.  Whenever there’s a singleton newcomer introduced to a flock on either side, the process seems about the same.  Brief universal shunning, a few short spats, begrudging acceptance into the lowest tier, and gradual tolerance of the newcomer and a place on the roosts at night with opportunities for social advancement, given time.

Are you my neighbor?

It’s not a bad system.  Better than some human ones I’ve participated in.  Similar to several of them, more humane than a couple.  I think it’s closer to being a newcomer in high school than to being a new professor in a mid-tier academic department… the latter situation can range from uplifting to downright horrifying, depending on the roosters in that flock.  I’ve seen it both ways, occasionally at the same time in the same department.  Being now a bit removed from the daily academic environment affords me the luxury of looking back and seeing it with new eyes.

Roosting neighbors

Overall, I loved being a professor.  And now I love being with my chickens even better.  Happy New Year.

*note to birders: I know that only woodcocks are said to “peent”, yet this unique and seldom used vocalization of the turkey reminds me of peenting (search “peenting” and you can hear woodcocks on YouTube), although it’s far from being the same call.  Someday I’ll record this insistent, nasal warning the turkey makes and post it.  Meanwhile, I’ll call it a peent.

Old Mr. Welsummer stands guard over the flock of hens, head up and sternly on the alert.

We were right there this morning when the hawks attacked.  A beautiful morning, my favorite kind of summer morning - cool, a slight mist, dew hanging on every stem and flower and spiderweb, rays from a low sun cutting through at a sharp angle.  P had just let the chickens out of the coop for the morning, then ducked inside for watering and egg gathering.  I had just thrown last night’s corncobs and tomato remnants to the flock of young birds and was enjoying the first leisurely Saturday morning in the garden I’ve had in more than a month.  Then there was the unmistakable sound of the attack - a sudden rushing Whoooooosh!, feet running, shrubbery rustling, and a split second later, chicken alarm call cacophony.

We both just missed seeing the actual attack, though we were right there - P in the coop, me head down in the swiss chard.  By the time we popped out and came running, chickens were in the shrubbery hiding, but loudly chorusing their distress call, and there was nothing to see in the bare area a distance from the coop.  We walked out a bit and looked around at the sky and trees.  At first we saw nothing, then, there it was.  About fifty feet from us, and only maybe 20 feet up on a dead tree branch, a young hawk or a falcon sat still, looking at us.  And at the chickens.  Waiting.

We made a move to see it more clearly, and it flew off.  But then, right after it, a second one hopped out of the deeper greenery, perched for a moment in the same place, and then followed the other one away.  By then we recovered from surprise enough to speed it on its way with some loud clapping and yelling.

We don’t know what they were for sure.  Perhaps young redtails.  They moved too fast, and I didn’t have my glasses on to see clearly.  Two young juveniles learning to hunt?  We will need to ramp up chicken security.  The raptors were smaller than the chickens, but still entirely capable of killing, if not carrying off, a full-grown chicken.  Our pack of roosters came through for us again, giving the alarm call and shepherding the hens to safety.  It seemed that the attack missed this time - no feathers on the ground, and actually siting the raptors to know they weren’t carrying a chicken - but they will likely be back.   (from The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, regarding red-tails, “Hunts mainly from perch, choosing same sentinel perch day after day….”)  Sigh….

Young radicchio starting to head

Last week’s bounty we took to the market included what were - to us - exciting additions of puntarelle, endive, and radicchio.  People bought the puntarelle, to some extent, often because it sounded unique and they were looking for something new to try.  But the beautiful heads of radicchio and frisée endive with its pretty blanched center, stayed on the table with the exception of one sale each.  So we have been eating a lot of both of them, and loving it so much that I’m not sorry they didn’t sell at market.  Except, I’m sad for how much people don’t know about greens and what they are missing in flavor, variety, and nutrition.

So I thought I’d do a series of posts about my experiences with these more unusual greens, and what delicious things to do with them.  The bitter greens I am talking about are just that - the bitter ones, from the chicory family.  These are different from the mustards - arugula, mustard greens, etc.  Mustards are all degrees of peppery, hot, and spicy, but not really bitter, while chicories are all degrees of bitter, but really not spicy.   I am not as much of a fan of the mustards as I am of the chicories.  This first post is devoted to Chicorium intybus, the radicchio.

Radicchio beside young leeks

This one isn't forming a head - just loose leaves

I have a lot of radicchio this year.  Two kinds - Palla Rossa, and Palla di Fuoco Rossa. I have finally learned that to have a lot of heads of radicchio, you have to grow a lot of it.  About every third plant is forming a really good head.  Some of the others have gone straight to a bolt - sending up a flower stalk, and some have turned into a ridiculous loose fluffy clump of leaves that should be in a head, but didn’t quite manage it.  Fortunately, the chickens love them, and can eat their fill of the unusable plants.

Chicken family happily feasting on outer leaves of radicchio

The delicate way the Fedco seed catalogue describes this unpredictable unreliability of radiccio amuses me:  “These radicchios are easy to raise from transplants although they have not yet been refined to absolute uniformity…”

That’s okay.  I like it.  I like the imperfection, and the wildness of it.  Our heads of radicchio are often a little bigger, softer, and looser than the rock-hard, small, dry grocery store radicchio heads.  If you are buying radicchio from me at the market, I’ve left some of the larger outer leaves on to keep them fresher - you can strip these off and find more of a head inside.

Beautifully headed and ready for picking

These things are as gorgeous as a rose, to me.

Two of our favorite ways to eat radicchio are cooked lightly with bacon, vinegar, and maple syrup, or mixed with frisée endive and tossed with a garlic-anchovy dressing and parmesan cheese.  Ohhhh, deliciousness.  I think that people often don’t know how to work with the bitter element in bitter greens and cooking, and therefore avoid it.  If you don’t think you like bitter greens, the key is to either cook it, which softens the bitterness, or to mix it with other greens or other foods to dilute the bitterness, or to dress it with flavors that compliment and change the bitterness.  (Or all three!)

Vinegar and acid flavors work magic on bitter chicories.  It seems like the bite of the acidity covers, or cuts, or changes the bitter flavor, and somehow, leaves it tasting sweet in the aftertaste.  All kinds of vinegar, and lemon can be used.  I also like a sour-sweet combination, like the vinegar-maple syrup dressings we often make.  Strong flavors - parmesan cheese, anchovies, garlic, good olive oil, and salty meats all also complement the bitters and work to the improvement of both tastes.

Dragonwood Radicchio with Bacon, Maple, and Vinegar:

pink and white hearts of radicchio, being shredded for sautée

Slice up a head of radicchio, or two (it cooks down to a fraction of its raw size) into fettuccini-like ribbons. While you’re slicing, start a skillet heating, and fry some diced bacon.  Slice up an onion or some shallots.  When the bacon is done, toss in the shallots, then the cut-up radicchio, into the pan with the bacon, and toss and turn it to coat it with the oil.  Add a tablespoon or so of red wine, or apple cider, or balsamic vinegar, and a splash of maple syrup, and salt and pepper as desired.  The heat should be high enough to cook away most of the juices as they form.  Keep tossing and stirring while the radicchio wilts down and cooks - just a few minutes is all it takes, and then it is done.  We like this topped with a fried egg and toast on the side, for breakfast.

If you like to grill, there are all kinds of grilling recipes for radicchio - here is a delicious-sounding example.