Let’s Talk Eggs!

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Raising chickens is fun, and it makes us feel like real farmers. We just got a shipment of 82 chicks in the mail, and you’d better believe picking up a cheeping box of fluff balls from the post office is the cutest thing in the world. In celebration of our new feathered friends, let’s chat about our birds and their eggs.

Pasture Raised

Our girls are pasture raised in the spring, summer, and autumn months. When we have hogs on the farm, the birds are rotationally grazed behind them. (Click here if you want to see what I mean.) Since we’ve decided to forego our swine companions this season, we’ll be rotationally grazing the chickens at their own pace. This benefits the fields through the fertilization of chicken poo, and it benefits our girls by providing a continuous supply of fresh grass to nibble.

A Space of Their Own

We’ve learned we need to keep our hens contained within an electric fence because if they’re allowed to roam free A) they take over our yard and destroy my flower beds, B) they surreptitiously hide nests of eggs, and C) Samson, our Great Pyrenees, plays a little too rough. (Let me prove it.)

Hens Within Electric Fence

Happy Birds

Liv Holding Henny Penny

Samson Checking Out Birds

Health Benefits

Getting our girls outside to frolic freely in the sunshine creates a healthier egg for at least two reasons.

1. Regular exposure to sunshine allows our hens to produce egg yolks rich in vitamin D3. (Check out the results of this study demonstrating that “the vitamin D3 content of egg yolk was three- to fourfold higher in the groups" of hens "that were exposed to sunlight compared with the indoor group.")

2. A diet of fresh grasses increases the vitamin E and healthy fats in our eggs. (Read a bit more about how "pastured hens' eggs had twice as much vitamin E and long-chain omega-3 fats, 2.5-fold more total omega-3 fatty acids, and less than half the ratio of omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids.”)

Colorful Eggs

We choose to raise breeds of birds that lay blue, green, dark brown, light brown, and white eggs. The color of the egg shell doesn’t change the flavor of the egg, by the way. We just like colorful eggs because it’s fun to create an ombre effect in the carton.

Read More!

Why We Have a Love/Hate Relationship with Failing

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If you’ve gotten this far with us, you know we legitimately have no business farming. (Despite our best efforts, though, we are actually getting better!) We’re committed to researching a lot and trying really hard. This fail better philosophy is both humbling and empowering. It repeatedly puts us in our place and reminds us we don’t have it all figured out. It also allows room for error; if you expect that failure is a likely outcome, it’s not so surprising when you come up against it.

Let’s be real, though. We don’t like failing. It’s uncomfortable and frustrating. It feels like the end of the world pretty much every time, but we try to lean into it because we know it’s good for us. It teaches us and makes us stronger. It prepares us for the next hurdle ahead of us that we may not see coming. We realize when we’re knocked down that it’s easier to see the trees rather than the forest. Indeed, we can usually only see the forest retrospectively.

Exhibit A

I posted a blog literally a week ago (Is a Great Pyrenees Right for You?) about how we were so proud of our dog Samson for his growth as a guardian of our free-range chickens. Can you guess what we woke up to this morning? A dead chicken. And there is absolutely no doubt our boy Samson is responsible.

Our Reaction

How do we respond to this setback? We initially feel deflated. We dabble in impostor syndrome, wondering why we think we have any business raising a livestock guardian dog.

Then we try to learn from the failure by asking questions. Is this our boy’s way of showing us he needs more supervised interaction with the birds? Is this a sign that we shouldn’t add to our flock? Should we put the electric fences back up that divide the chickens from the dog?

Disappointing set backs like this happen every day around here. If there’s not a wonky fence post needing to be replaced, then a couple dozen eggs got cracked when somebody tripped, or the carrot seeds aren’t germinating as expected. Aaron and I take turns reassuring each other that we’re following our dream and that hiccups are a part of growth and learning.

And sometimes we don’t have a crystal clear path to fixing the problem. We just keep trying different things and hoping for the best. It’s exhausting and disappointing and rewarding. It’s freaking life.

The Overwhelm

Little fails have a way of adding up to a death of a thousand cuts, right? They make life feel overwhelming. You wonder if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Moving forward feels as sensible as tidying up the Titanic. What’s the point?

When you’ve invested so much of yourself into your dream, it’s really disappointing to stomach road blocks. I know you know, reader, because everybody living on planet Earth in 2020 knows. Today it’s a dead chicken, but who knows what tomorrow holds? And there are only so many dead chickens a person can take. (I apologize if a dead chicken metaphor offends any of you.)

Attempting to Reset Mindset

We are repeatedly reminding ourselves that we’re grateful for our problems. That we get to deal with them together as a team. That they are problems that are completely within our power to overcome. That we learn and grow so much through dealing with them.

But a fail still feels like a sucker punch sometimes.