Kitchen Chicken

We bought a dozen eggs for 99 cents on Friday. It doesn't make sense to have your own birds laying eggs when you can buy a dozen eggs for next to nothing with no labor involved; or does it?

We bought six pullets (baby laying hens) at the local farm store. We live in town, so right about now you are probably pitying our neighbors not to mention town ordinances, which I won't go into. So how will this work?

Right now the happy little ladies are in a tub with thick bedding in our garage. My husband is building a mini chicken tractor that will be moved to fresh grass everyday. Once they are fully feathered, they will find their new home more than accommodating.

Chickens are omnivores, which means, like us, they eat everything. So instead of throwing away our kitchen scraps we will create a buffet for the little ladies. The chickens are the ultimate recyclers. They eat kitchen scraps and in return give us eggs. This also cuts down on the feed bill.

The boys love doing chicken chores. First thing in the morning we are out in the garage. The boys crouch down and just watch them peck and scratch. We fed them a little cabbage, and we just watched them. It was very entertaining, kind of like feeding bread crumbs to ducks by the river.

You get what you pay for is a common saying that I think we forget also applies to food. Those 99 cent eggs were from a chicken house with hundreds of thousands of other chickens. I won't go into the details, but it's factory farming at it's best. It's what makes Iowa the number one egg producer in the country. However, there are consequences. Those eggs have to be washed and sanitized, rightly so, which leads to chlorine being applied to a permeable egg shell. I guess I would rather have chlorine than salmonella, but it also leads me to the actual nutritional value. Do you prefer a light pale color yolk or an orange rich color? I'm not used to a darker color, so I prefer the lighter color yolk. Even though the darker color is what will really give you the most nutrition and usually doesn't come from factory farmed egg.

This is all just food for thought when you might think we are eccentric for having laying hens in town. Start thinking outside the box when it comes to your food, literally outside the processed box. If wecan do it on less than a quarter of an acre surely you can too.