The eggs are coming! The eggs are coming!

I received notice from my friend, Chris, that the 31 hens he bought in the early spring in hopes to have them begin to lay eggs for us in July have indeed laid some eggs. Today he gathered 17 eggs. Yeterday he gathered 6. Some of those may be smaller eggs (also known as pullet eggs), and some may be medium or large eggs. I am not sure if we will have eggs to purchase on Thursday, but I suppose it is time for me to gather the final information on the egg shares from him and pass it on to you. (Chris was nervous about offereing egg shares in case the hens never laid any eggs). I will verify his plans for offering all of us eggs and then let you know the details like price per dozen and how to get them during your pick up time.
In case you are wondering about how these hens have been raised, they roam the great outdoors during the day and are put inside a coop at night (to protect them from predators). They are fed a natural feed, but it is not certified organic. They are not given antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick. (They don't need it since they can graze on pasture as they like and get plenty of fresh outside air.) They are a sturdy breed of hen that has been around for a while, and has not been terribly overbred in order to get maximum laying production out of each bird. Chris describes his hen keeping as "the way they were raised 100 years ago". If you have any questions post a comment, and once I know the answer I will post one back. Or send me an email.

Where have the posts gone?

Boy last week flew by! I wanted to post a bit about the chickens we are raising, but it seems as though I don't know enough about them to tell you anything yet. They are growing, and enjoying the variety of plants offered to them in our orchard. I find myself watching them each morning after I move them to fresh pasture to see what they eat. They graze like they are at a salad bar-a nibble of plaintain, a peck of clover leaf, and a small piece of chicory. I wish I could offer them a wider variety each day to see if they might like grazing in our fallow vegetable beds. Our long term plan for our farm involves grazing animals in parts of our vegetable fields to remineralize them. This batch of birds is our first step toward this goal.
Last week we made the decision to take control of pollinating our cucumbers ourselves. Usually we leave the crop exposed so bees can visit the flowers and impregnate all the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers. Unfortunately we are under attack by cucumber beetles. They are a small green and black striped beetle that carries the Cucumber Mosaic Virus from infected plants to healthy ones. Infected plants wilt and die within 2-3 days after infection. If we did nothing, we could lose our entire crop within a couple of weeks. We decided to spray Pyganic in the early morning and still found plants were wilting at midday. We covered the plants with row cover in a effort to keep any new beetles away from the plants. This is helping, but now we can not rely on bees to pollinate the flowers for us. Every morning now we must hit the fields, remove the row cover, locate a male flower (it has a straight stem and long pointy center), peel off its petals, and rub it in the center of the female flowers (it has a tiny, fuzzy cucumber on the stem and a creased center. We hope that we will be able to keep the cucumber beetles away from the plants long enough for us to get tired of eating cukes. More tomorrow night.