Sweet little cluckers so eggciting
There’s nothing like having freshly-laid free-range eggs in the fridge, says Joanna Davis. Is it time for you to hen up?
This week I snuck some eggs to a recovering vegan. I dropped them to her slightly-surprised flatmate while she was out volunteering at the enviro-centre.
Gratefully accepting the offer, my friend had asked me, in a joking way, to keep it on the downlow. But I felt nothing other than virtuous about passing on this gift of vitality and nutrition.
‘‘Hens’ eggs have enough goodness in them to grow an entire baby bird,’’ I’d said to her when she confessed she’d started eating butter again for her health.
‘‘How amazing is that?’’ These eggs truly are freerange. For over a year now, I’ve kept a flock of hens, three brown shavers – the breed recommended to me as they are basically engineered to be egglaying machines.
It started with feeding a neighbour’s chooks while she was away. My children, particularly my farmer-wannabe tweenager, was enthralled with them.
He liked petting them and feeding them and catching them after they’d run around a bit. And to take away brand-new eggs that the chooks had laid that very day seemed too good.
He was almost inclined to try eating them (but we steered clear of the near-miracle there; the child doesn’t like healthy food).
So we thought we’d get some. We have a big section, no substantial vege garden, and as previously established, I believe in the goodness of eggs.
If this had been a longthought-out plan, we might have waited until some other domestic hen-keeper decided to
de-flock and bought their unneeded coop. As it was, we shelled out $180 for a flatpack monstrosity on Trade Me.
It took us two weeks of having it all over the living room floor to put it together. I still have the spare screws in a drawer.
Then my stepdad found us a bigger coop (secondhand, $10, already-assembled) – because duh, they need an area to sleep/
roost in and a separate area to lay eggs in.
At this point, we were ready to acquire the stars of the show themselves.
We drove 30 minutes into the country to buy them from a place recommended universally, having locked in the sale online.
Making the purchase, I’d had to look away as their website’s homepage opened to a chicken
coop – house, frame, ladder, wheels and 2-metre run – for $1895. They had hens for sale, from $10 for day-old chicks to $39 for hens at point-of-lay.
We chose somewhere in the middle, with advice about their likely-to-start laying date some weeks away.
The man said they sold a minimum of three. These are flock animals, was his unsaid criticism of my stupid townyness.
He upended three girls unceremoniously and carried them by their legs to my carefully pre-constructed (to his helpful instructions) banana boxes.
He also upsold me over $200 of chicken essentials. That included an $88 ‘‘drinker’’ – basically a plastic device that holds water – which ended up not fitting in our coop in any way, shape or form.
I did manage to resist buying a $195 step-on feeder, figuring half the joy in this mission was going to be letting the kids scatter chicken food.
You could have set your watch to the chicken man’s point-of-lay predictions. By late summer they were regularly producing one egg each a day, and they haven’t missed as many as a handful of days in the year since.
Happily for me, I like eggs boiled, poached, scrambled, even curried like we used to do in the 80s. My children are not quite as enamoured. Introduce . . . baking!
Another of the joys of owning chickens is giving away eggs. People get unreasonably excited knowing that they are genuine, bona fide, 100 per cent free-range.
They know for sure because they’ve seen the state of my garden.
Because that is, admittedly, a slight downside. I let the girls out to free-range every day – it’s such a joy to see them pecking at dirt, fossicking for bugs, eating grass and running around after each other. And, of course, it’s good for their eggs if their diet is more varied.
But while they are out, if I’m not watching carefully (and sometimes armed with the hose – I’m not a total sucker) they love nothing more than to scratch about and dispose of any and all bark that’s on the garden.
They s..t on the footpaths. They come into the house. They dig up perfectly good, justplanted plants.
Luckily for them, I know for sure that, come 8am when I lift the lid on the laying end of the coop, there are always, always, so very nearly always, three beautiful fresh eggs in there.