This is another Dragonwood egg report… we haven’t had one in a while.  In short, February has been nothing short of amazing.  In the first week of February the hens were laying about 6 eggs a day (range 3-8) and had been doing so since November.  It’s now the 26th of February as I write this, and today we got 26 eggs.  That’s an increase of about one egg a day for three weeks straight!  Go ladies go!

For reference, this is the way egg season seems to work.  As the hours of daylight get longer, the ladies lay more eggs, more frequently, and as the hours of daylight wane across the summer, the egg laying falters.  For us, it means eggs start coming back in February, peak in June, and start waning in earnest come September.  From mid-October to late-February we don’t get enough eggs to sell, and barely enough to eat ourselves (and an occasional dozen for nearby family).  In mid-summer, we get roughly 2/3 production daily - two of three hens lay each day.

Our flocks are pretty naturalized… we don’t give them artificial light or artificial anything during the winter to force them through molting faster or to stimulate laying.  The most artificiality they get from us is that a couple times a winter when the temperature at night is going to fall below zero we might turn on a heat lamp for the coldest hours.

By contrast, it’s standard practice at egg farms to completely manage lighting cycles for hens so that they lay as many eggs as possible with as little seasonal downtime as possible.  This is equivalent to cracking the whip over those slave hens.  The hens have a brief molting period artificially imposed, and then it’s back to work.

Them: Egg Slave Factory Farms.

Us: Hey, take four months off, you deserve it.  Thanks for all the hard work.

So, now it’s February and the eggses are landing.  We’ve got lots of teeny pullet eggs coming in from the new flock we raised last fall, as well as increasing numbers of large eggs from the older ladies.  This photo is the first dozen eggs I collected today, laid out in the fresh snow on our picnic table.

We get so used to our big eggs that we think the pullet eggs are just SO TEENY that we call them “culls” and never sell them to anyone.  But I began wondering, just how small are these eggs?  And how big are the big ones?  So I got out the market scale to measure a few, and now I can quantificate our eggsitential nature for your edification.

Our littlest pullet eggs:  6 of them weighed in at 9.8 oz.  That means a dozen would weigh in at 19.6 ounces… not bad.

Our big bruiser eggs: today’s biggest three eggs weighed 8.4 oz together.  That means a dozen would weigh about 33.2 oz.  Wow.

Last fall I measured a couple of our average dozen we were selling at the Westside Farmer’s Market in Ann Arbor.  The dozens (with a range of all our sizes except for “culls”) averaged a hair over 30 oz.

Perspective?  At yer local store where sellers have to actually sort them by size and such, the size categories are: small (18 oz), medium (21 oz), large (24 oz), extra large (27 oz), and jumbo (30 oz).

Holy ostrich, Batman!  Our teeniest pullet eggs are halfway between small and medium.  Our average dozen we sell are jumbos.  What does that make our real bigguns?  Extra jumbo?  Super jumbo?  Ginormous?

And then talk about yer bargain pricing.  We sold eggs last year for $4 a dozen.  Chemical free, free-ranging, practically pets, beautiful browns and greens and blues in the jumbo size for $4.  By comparison, you can drop in at the People’s Food Co-op and get somebody else’s eggs there that look just like ours, browns and blues and greens all pretty, for $5.75 a dozen, in the “large” size.  Large.  That’s 24 oz of eggs.  Dragonwood’s Dozen, by comparison, is running 25% more egg (30 vs 24 oz) for about 25% less, which works out precisely to… oh, that’s not easy math.  Instead, those eggs from somebody else would only be about $3.25 at the pricing scale we use, not $5.75.  And if we sold our eggs at somebody else’s price, our jumbo dozens should cost about $7.20 per dozen, instead of $4.

Get yer Dragonwood Bargain Basement Eggs now!  Whoohoo!

That smorgasboard seems to sum up the week!   On our porch is a chicken in a cage, and two planters full of celery plants.  We butchered 17 meat chickens while enduring a communal cold, and something has been simmering on the stove almost all day every day.  I’ve had a bit of a break from work this week, and tried to use it for autumn catch-up, even while nursing a cold.

The young chicken on the porch in a cage has a broken leg. Total mystery how that came to be, she just turned up hopping on one foot with the other hanging, obviously broken.  Chickens are relentless at picking on someone who’s injured, and her companions turned bullies immediately.  She had to be separated from them to not be killed by pecking.  Between the options of putting her down, or going to the vet and ending up with a $500 chicken, I decided I couldn’t do either, and would try splinting her leg as best I could, and leave the rest up to her and the higher powers.  She has a break right in or above the equivalent of the ankle on a chicken.  She’s been doing great in her little homemade cast for the past week -immobilization made it comfortable, and she rests and eats and seems to be healing.  She is one of our new Aracauna pullets for next years’ laying flock; I was not happy about this damage.

On one particularly cold clammy afternoon, I made myself go out even with a throbbing head and runny nose and dig the celery to save it from hard freezing.  We are not as advanced with hoophouses/winter shelters this year as I had hoped we’d be.  We have a wonderful harvest of celery… finally!  It puttered all through the hot dry summer, but has grown to loveliness now in this last cool but not cold 2 months.  I harvested down as much as I can keep in the refrigerator, dug about 15 of the best plants, and replanted them in planters to bring in under cover.  They will keep on producing useable celery for us for a little while.  You just can’t make really good soup without celery, and yet it is on the list of the most pesticide-poisoned veggies you can get (and not easy to wash or peel!).  It’s so nice to grow our own, but it takes some strategizing to have it available more than only 1/3 of the year.

We’re filling our freezer with 6-9 months supply of homegrown pastured chicken, and traded some of the chicken for half a grass-fed organic lamb raised a few miles away.  I’ve been making stocks from boiled bones, from some organic grassfed beef we had in the freezer, and now from the chicken bones.  It is amazing stuff - lovely color, tasty, so full of gelatin and chondroitin that it gels up strongly in the refrigerator.  Making really good soups while we have colds has been wonderful.  Here’s one that disappeared really quickly…it was soooo good:  That rich chicken broth, our own Snowcap beans, and our veggies, including onions, leeks, celery, wax beans, garlic, and kale.

When the stockpot hasn’t been occupied with broth and soup, I’ve made a batch of quince jelly, and one of Green Tomato Chutney.  The chutney turned out really spectacularly.  Green tomatoes, apple, quince, red bell pepper, hot pepper, onions all get chopped and simmered in a pot with raisins, mustard seed, curry powder, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, and ginger, some sugar, and some vinegar.  I use maple sugar/turbinado/sorghum when I can.  Oh, it was delicious this time!

photo by Paul

Ain’t she lovely?

It’s been the season of the moult here.  Chickens moult about once a year, meaning they shed a good deal of their feathers, lay kindof low, and (usually) cease laying eggs.  Our egg production has shrunk until we haven’t any extra to sell, and probably won’t from now until late January or February.

It always seems crazy to me that moulting has to occur at the time of year when it’s getting cold…. those poorly-clad shivery-looking bare chickens in the cool breezes of November tug at my heart.  But I suppose it does make sense.  Their feathers grow back by the depths of winter when they really need them, and then in spring and summer, during chick hatching season, hens absolutely need their feathers for incubating eggs and warming little chicks.

This hen’s moult has been more severe-looking than many of them are.  Most just look rumpled and untidily ragged, but this poor girl lost more.  Many of the other chickens in the photo have already gone through their moults, and are sporting nice new feathers for winter.

There seem to be two ways to spell “moult”, or “molt”.  I like the UK way, adding in extra letters.  We had to choose which way to spell it here, and, not necessarily to be unnAmurkun or anything, we went for the Brit way.  This girl is, after all, a Speckled Sussex.

The call comes promptly at 7am.

A sleepy sort of shaky-excited voice says, “I’m calling because your chicks are here!” Twenty-nine new chicks arrived at our post office this morning.  P went to get them while I set up the bin and heat lamp on the porch that will be their home for a week or so until they can transition to an outdoor coop.

These will be next years’ layers.  We tried to restock earlier this summer, and raised 40-some lovely egglayers and meat birds to strong fully-fledged teenagers, only to lose all of them to a huge raccoon attack.  That was two months ago, and it’s still hard to talk about it.  Few can really understand how farmers feel about marauding predators until they see for themselves what animals will do to each other.  Most of us carry a fantasy ideal that predators will only kill what they need to survive.  In my experience, raccoons will usually eat portions of one or two birds, and simply bite the rest of them in the head and neck and leave them lying there, going from one to the next until they kill all they can, or are interrupted.

So that unhappy history is the background to these new chicks.  Our flocks are also aging now, we have fewer eggs coming in, and we’ve lost some adults this summer to either a hawk, a coyote, or a fox, as far as we can tell.  No sightings, just a random chicken vanishing into the thicket here and there.  We also have 9 2-week old chicks hatched out under 2 setty hens, and another hen setting eggs due to hatch in a week and a half or so.  But we can expect half of those to be roosters.  Next week, meat chicks arrive.  Today’s new little ones are pullets - a mix of Aracaunas, Buff Orpingtons, and Black Australorps.  They should be very nice, and we’re excited to start over…again.

Friday the 13th:  We know now that we’ve been losing chickens this week.  About 10.  About one a day, since about when the leaves fell.  We’ve seen the hawk several times.  This morning I got up early and when it was light walked out in the morning mist.  The weeds and branches were softer in the fine rain, and didn’t cling to me so much as yesterday.  I found three spots, as though visiting shrines on a pilgrimage, where a sad soft cloud of feathers on the ground marked a chicken loss.  The cobwebs dripped teardrops when I brushed them.  And the complicated interwoven circle of life goes on.