Chef's Compliments!

My friend Jane's husband is a chef at the local yacht club; I sent a dozen eggs home with her a couple weekends ago, and happened to catch him on the phone the other night. "Hey, your eggs are fantastic!"  (oh really? tell me more) "Yeah, I mean it. They hold up well when I poach them, the whites don't get all stringy, (whatever that means), "they have color, they have taste, they're rich.....all the things you expect from an egg but don't get anymore." (Chest swells)   "So you must be doing something right!"  (Well, I don't mean to brag...)  "I'm sure it's a lot of work too!"  (Yeah, especially the part where I run outside and throw food scraps into my yard.)
Just thought I'd share that tidbit with you. If you think of having chickens for egg production, you too will be raking in the praises. Be sure to reward your hens with special treats for all their hard work!

Two-Day Take

I'm told we can expect our hens to lay an egg a day (or every other day); so far we're getting anywhere from 4-7  from our 13 hens, so they're not all laying yet. This is our "two-day take" -- as you can see, my standard size chickens are laying more eggs than my two banties, as we have retrieved only one banty egg (the light colored one above). I've read that this is typical of banties, they tend to go "broody" which means they only want to sit and lay on an egg once they have one, and are not as productive. So if egg production is your "thing," you don't want to go with banty hens. But I wanted to keep the white silkies just because they were fun to look at and hold, and don't really care that they aren't the best layers. They're like the "high maintenance" girls in the chicken world -- fancy feathers, bling, turning the heads of every cock around, and not really into work. That's my Eugenie & Beatrice.

What's in a Name?

One of the first things I wanted to do when our pullets were just little chickies, was to name them; yet months later, I still struggle with whether or not we have chosen the perfect ‘handles’ for our feathery bundles of joy.  For most of them, we had to wait weeks until they were grown to their full size before we could see their true colors. Only one was named early on by personality alone, and that was Napoleon -  our short , tough, in-charge banty rooster. Unfortunately, we had to give Napoleon to a woman who has more property (read: no neighbors), as his tireless crowing became well, tiring and we had promised our neighbors we wouldn’t subject them to that noise. (Napoleon, if you’re reading this, we still miss your tyranny!)

The Silkies were the next easiest to name. The world had just witnessed The. Royal. Wedding.  I couldn’t help but see a connection between our silkies and a couple famous wedding guests.  Our funky, silky white banties with poofs on their heads that stick up at awkward angles as well as hang over their eyes, and feathers on their toes and shanks, became Beatrice & Eugenie.  They totter around the yard like two chubby little girls wearing heels for the first time, but apparently their wild head accoutrements turned them into the chicken yard bitches (proven by Napoleon’s possessive and slightly rough treatment of them).

This left me with 5 “blacks” (4 hens and a non-crowing rooster), 4 “reds” (really the color of muddy clay, but in the hen world, that equals red), and later, the acquisition of one Buff (i.e., blonde) Chantecler and two Silver Laced Wyandottes.

The 5 black chickens became the Jackson Five (except the rooster ended up going to the same farm as Napoleon, so that broke up the group, and we decided the rooster must have been Michael).  I guess I could call one of them Janet, but they're all female, so I need to get off the Jackson Five thing and find some decent names for them.

The reds seemed even harder, until I thought of my grandma.  Because Grandma had red hair when she was a girl, I had the idea to name the reds after her and her sisters:  Grayce,  Pansy, Violet, and Rose. They are our best layers!

Our three youngest are the ones I chose specifically for their heritage breeds, good nature, and cold-hardiness. The Buff Chantecler (blonde) is named after my friend Cathy, who chick-sat for them the day they arrived at the post office (and who is a natural blonde herself). The two Silver-Laced Wyandottes became Oprah & Whoopie. They're girls with a lotta bling.

So that’s our clan of 13 hens – a baker’s dozen as they say. If you have any good ideas for naming the black hens, leave me note.