Every hen lays a special egg. To lay wonderful eggs, chickens need good food, plenty of exercise, and a quiet place to sit.
Hazel’s Egg
Never a Dull Moment
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With chickens, there is never a dull moment. It’s a sunny, January morning. The hens in the nesting boxes are sounding an alarm. Minutes later, all is calm. Outside, the chickens are enjoying the winter sun. Chickens are constantly on the move. In a matter of minutes they will travel long distances.
Dirt Bath in the Sun
On a sunny day, chickens enjoy taking dust and dirt baths. They can really kick up a storm, turning upside down even to work dust and dirt deep into their feathers and onto their skin. They do this to clean themselves, and to get rid of parasites. How this works is that the dust clogs the breathing pores of the parasites, killing them. Smart birds.
That’s why when chickens shake their bodies, sometimes they leave behind a cloud of dust.
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Up a Tree
Chicken producers talk about providing enriching environments for their birds, but none of the large producers ever provide trees for their chickens to climb. During the day, a growing sequoia is an enticing place to hang out, either underneath it or up in its branches.
I certainly don’t want to lump Mary’s Chicken with the likes of Foster Farms or Tyson, but even an outstanding farm like Mary’s Chicken which takes chicken welfare seriously can not provide the rich environment like a man and his hoe®.
Strike a Pose
Every chicken at a man and his hoe® has a story. Lucky had an unfortunate accident as a chick. Somehow she scraped the back of her head and for several weeks had to be separated from her siblings and mother while her wound healed. We kept her in a wire cage next to her siblings so she wouldn’t feel isolated. Even so, it was not an easy time for her as she so wanted to be running around with them. Unfortunately, chicks can’t help but peck when they see blood, and if we had let her run with her siblings, she would have met with an unfortunate demise.
Once her wound healed, we were able to set her free. Now she cuts an imposing figure, and has a habit of laying her egg in one of the dog houses. If we don’t fetch her egg quickly enough, the dogs get a tasty snack. We just have to keep our ears attuned to her “I’ve hatched an egg” cackle between seven and eight in the morning to fetch the eggs before the dogs get it.
One Month Old Chicks
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The chicks which hatched December 19, 2013, are four months old now, nearly a month old. They are getting quite independent and running ahead of their mother. She’s the one trying to keep up with them now.
Some mothers stop their child rearing around now. Others continue for another month or two. We’ll see how long she keeps on the job.
Svenda’s Egg
Each chicken is unique. Each egg is unique. The variety of colors and patterns of chickens is endless. With each new chicken you can see evolution at work, trying new colors, patterns and personalities. The differences can be very subtle, but look closely and you’ll see them. And each chicken lays a slightly different egg every time. Over the life of a chicken it amounts to an incredible variety of eggs just from one bird. Life is always trying to better itself, trying this color, that shape, testing to see what will endure.
Buying eggs in a supermarket is downright depressing. The industrialists who supply the market with billions of eggs do their best to stamp out this riot of egg variety. By devoting all their energy on keeping costs down, they are depriving consumers of the joy beautiful eggs can bring. One amazing aspect of my chickens’ eggs is the sound they make when you tap them together. Close your eyes and gently tap these eggs together and you hear the distinctive clinking of bone china. You’ll never hear that from commercial eggs.
This Is Chicken?
The variety of meat chicken can provide is truly remarkable. Below is the leg and thigh meat of a roasted, fully grown rooster. The flavor and texture is very similar to a mild goat roast. If you closed your eyes and ate this rich meat, you would have no idea it was chicken.
Gina Bisco in her article Rediscovering Traditional Meats from Historic Chicken Breeds, describes the traditional chicken meat classes, broiler, fryer, roaster and fowl, which were used until the 1940s to describe the various types of chicken meat.
Up until the 1940s, the age at which a chicken was butchered determined its meat class. These classes are no longer used as modern chicken farming has dramatically speeded up the rate at which commercial chickens grow. Most now grow only six to eight weeks before they are processed. They eat voraciously, exercise little, and become fat birds in the blink of an eye. If humans grew at the speed modern chickens do, we would weigh over 300 pounds by the time we were two years old. At that speed, the traditional meat classes become meaningless as there is no difference between a six week old chicken and an eight week old chicken.
Don’t click this link if you are the least bit squeamish, but you get a good idea what modern chicken farming is about in the video: 45 Days: The Life and Death of a Broiler Chicken. Don’t worry, you’ll never find such chicken at A Man and His Hoe. Chickens here are hatched from eggs incubated by loving mothers, and raised with the care only mother hens can provide.
A fully grown rooster is quite impressive when it is trussed and ready to be roasted. Like all chickens which forage for food and walk long distances every day, most of the meat is on the legs and thighs. The redness of the legs and thighs shows through the firm skin.
And roasted, the deep color of the leg and thigh meat is even more evident.
A rooster like this is slow food at its best. Not only do you have to let a rooster grow nearly an entire year, once butchered, you need to let it age in the refrigerator for at least a week before you roast it or pressure cook it, another great way to prepare fully grown rooster.
If you would like to try one of these magnificent birds, call or text me at 360-202-0386, or send an email to theman@amanandhishoe.com. Be advised, that these fully grown roosts are not available all the time, however you are always welcome to get your name on the waiting list for them.
Morning Eggs
Even though it is still early January, the hens are laying more eggs. Their winter slump has ended and daily egg production has gone from five to seven up to eighteen. It will double from that in a few months.
We have one hen, Lucky, who lays her eggs in one of the dog houses. Each morning it is a race between us and the dogs as to who gets her eggs. This morning we got the egg. Most mornings all we find is an empty shell.
Where Do You Want Your Chicken to Come From?
Where would you prefer to get your chicken? From a plant like this Foster Farms processing plant which was recently closed due to cockroach infestation? At a plant like this, up to 140 chickens move through the processing line a minute. That is more than two chickens a second. And the chicken processing companies want to speed these processing lines up to 175 chickens per minute.
Or would you rather get your chickens from a quiet cabin in the woods where chickens are butchered just one at a time, and only five or so chickens are ever butchered in a single day, with each one being handled with great care?
Chickens at a man and his hoe never leave their home. They are never transported in crowded containers to processing plants miles from home. Instead, they are carefully caught, and once caught, their heads are covered with soft towels to keep them calm. They never see what is happening to them, and the other chickens never see another chicken being butchered.
It is your choice.
