Tag: rural living

Thoughts on the price of eggs…

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As you are aware I am back in the chicken egg business again.  To say that the business proposition does not make one wealthy is an understatement, but for the most part the sales pay for feed and scratch.

If I let myself start thinking on it, as I am now, I can get a bit perturbed.  Why you ask?  Well, it’s this way, if I sold my Farm Fresh, Pasture Raised Hen’s Eggs at the farmer’s markets over in Madison, I could get $3.50 a dozen for them.  If I lived in Connecticut,  like Red Bee Marina Marchese, I could get $5.00 a dozen!  As it is, I live here in N. Alabama in a tiny farming burgh and try to sell mine for $2.50 per dozen… but the potential customers scoff at the price.

Here is a recent example of what I am up against:

I finally spent the money to put up a sign on the main road to point potential customers to the Farmlet.  So after three days of not getting even a nibble… I got a customer!

The lady gets out of her car and carefully walks across the lawn.  She’s one of those heavyset ladies with the tightly curled and blue tinted hairdo that ladies of a certain age are all so fond of.  When she gets to the door and rings I open it and politely greet her.

She says, “How much foh yuh eggs?”

I say,  “$2.50 a dozen”

Upon hearing the price I see her eyebrows have shot up and she is now clenching the clasp of her handbag and holding it to her ample bosom.  After the momentary shock wears off she drawls, “That’s way moah the the stoah’s sellin’m foh!”

To which I politely explain that mine were after all laid yesterday,  my hens aren’t kept in inhumane conditions, if she tries them she will surely like them because they have far better flavor than what she will find at the grocery.  And finally, was she aware that the grocery store eggs can be well over a month old by the time she buys them?

She gives me a hesitant look, and I realize that I’m loosing her as a customer… so I quickly blurt, “If you bring me your carton back for me to refill it will give you .25 cents off of your next dozen!”

To which she replies “How much do ya’ll want for your eggs?”

I caved.  I told her, “For you $2.00 after the discount.”

At that, she pried open her handbag and peeled two dollars out of her wallet to hand to me.

I have not seen her again and its been two weeks.  Maybe she just doesn’t eat that many eggs?

Who can say?

In the meantime I have found an outlet for my surplus eggs!  I am selling them at the Farmers Co-op downtown!  So OK, I am still not getting rich, but at least I am selling all of my eggs now!   And that’s a happy thing!  “:<>

Here’s an update!

Yesterday the lady I told you about (above) came back to buy another dozen eggs.  This was nice!  But what made it spectacular was that she has reserved in advance three dozen for the 8th of August!

“Nah remembuh…” she reminds me, “… that’s three dozen on thuh 8th. of August.  I wanna send some home with mah friend who’s visiten from Nawth Caralina!”

I love this lady!

*  Click HERE to find out more information on the health benefits and differences of “Pastured” vs.  “Free Range” and “Factory Farm”  hen’s eggs.

My Summary of Summer…

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We are having the most perfect fall morning.  You know…  the one where the sky is just the right shade of blue, the sun makes everything shine, and the air is cool and clear.   I open the windows and breathe in deeply…  Thinking of Summer’s demise and the official start of fall the Equinox that will not arrive until “…03:09 (or 3:09am) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on September 23, 2010…” officially speaking.  And that brings me to…

My Summary of Summer: or how I learned to survive and enjoy it in spite of the drought.

Yee-gads, what a summer it has been!  With fall preparations right around the corner I take these few moments to share with you.  So here it is.  The truth of it.

We’ve lost, gained, learned and grown, in our knowledge of gardening, critters and bees.  However, we found out essential things along the way.  For this is the importance of our lessons after all… that we have indeed learned from them.

Lessons such as:

  1. Hawks gotta eat.  We lost one Buff Polish rooster and a Guinea Hen to the hawks this summer.  We were very sad about it but out of 35 beaks we consider the losses minimal.
  2. Chickens don’t like snakes.  Well really, we knew that, but what we didn’t know was that they would actually chase them off the property!  Amazing to see!
  3. When vegetable gardening you need to plant about four times as much as you think you will need.  Why?  Because you need enough for you and the little squirrels and voles that love to nibble the bottoms off of every tomato, pepper, and bean within their reach.  You also need enough to feed all the squash bugs and tomato horn worms, and any other insect that comes by to dine!  And this is important… you need enough to share with the neighbors who graciously put up with the noise and flies that your menagerie will produce (no matter what you do to combat them)!  Although a dozen eggs now and again goes a long way to keeping them from complaining!  ;D
  4. Murphy’s Law – If there is a draught and you fix the pump and get it going, then the rain will come… in buckets and torrents!  AND  If stops raining again, then you will surely dig up the electric line that was buried shallowly in the soil and end up running a very long extension cord out to make it run again… yes REALLY!
  5. Bees, if properly housed and protected, can be quite self-sufficient and really need little else from me.  I pretty much leave them alone, they have plenty of their own stores to eat, are healthy, and show little evidence of dreaded intruders such as hive beetle, veroa mites and wax moths.  In fact, it would seem that my chickens do a very good job of breaking the cycle of the hive beetles, and I have seen no evidence of mites or wax moths.  Bees are very impressive little critters!

All in all I feel that difficulties we faced were minor, the knowledge we have gained was invaluable, and this winter will allow us to do quite a bit to be more prepared for next spring and summer!

Things we need to do between now and next spring are:

  1. Build the geese an outside hut for sleeping in.  Right now they are being shepherded into the barn each night.  They need a little home of their own!
  2. Build a cold frame for starting seeds.
  3. Build a potting table (done!!!) with an old kitchen sink in it.  It will be useful for transplanting seedlings into newspaper cups and placing picked fruits and vegetables up off the ground so the chickens can’t peck them.  Oh the sink?  Well that will be a good place to wash the soil off of everything before I bring it into the house.
  4. Build a garden bench to sit and rest a spell while I contemplate work that needs doin’,  to look at all I have accomplished, and to take  a moment now and again to be grateful for all I have been blessed with!

Were you blessed this summer?  Perhaps you might take a moment to write a comment and share your blessings with other readers?

I hope so!

Lynda

P.S.  I’ve a bit of humor to share with you before I close.

 

WHAT’S ALL THE COMMOTION ABOUT?

Why, its Lil’ Bit on the prowl!

Now…  how could you possibly be afraid of that?

Conversations over the fence

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Remember the cartoon in the Sunday paper by Don Keane called “Family Circus?”  If you do, you will recall that often he would show Billy’s day by tracking it in dotted lines across the illustration.

Well, when I watch my geese and their antics each day I think of Family Circus.  You see my acre of yard is divided across the back into three sections with gates to access each section.  I move the geese from section to section on a three-day rotation, because no matter how much I love them, let’s face it, they are very messy creatures!

The third section is the chicken yard and it has a gate into the pasture behind us.  Now this is the fun part of their week!  They can chase the chickens, invade their run to raid the chicken food, go out into the pasture and run and honk to their heart’s content.  Often when I look out my dining room window I will catch them lined up along the back fence looking in at me.  If they notice me looking back they will begin to honk loudly and carry on to entice me to come say,  “Hey!” and chat awhile.

But it is the early morning on chicken yard days that is the most fun!  I let them out of the barn and lure them to the chicken yard with a scoop of grain for breakfast and a clean bucket of water to chase it down.  Then, it’s off to the pasture to run and visit the neighbor on the other side.

They love my neighbor because she feeds them only her choicest weeds over the fence and she will stand there and talk to them for up to 15 minutes or more.  I assume the conversations to be about the weather, weeds, and other topics of interest to a goose, but I can’t be sure…

Whatever it is they discuss I sense the geese are never ready for the conversation to end so soon, because they always begin to honk and chatter when she leaves them to go inside…

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*  In researching the Family Circus I found out that the dotted lines are actually called a “Billy Path.”   FUN!

For more information on Family Circus, or just to satisfy your curiosity if you aren’t familiar with Billy, you will find it here:  http://www.familycircus.com/

…and I survived it all too.

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This has been a wonderful and terrifying week here on the Farmlet.  As you may know, we fixed our well two weeks back, and now this week brings the rain.  Isn’t it ironical that when you get it in your mind to finally do something about a situation, that the situation is suddenly resolved of its own accord?  Such was the case with the water shortage we have been experiencing this summer.

So, on Monday we had rain.

And in only 15 minutes we had three inches out our back door!

The  front of our little Farmlet didn’t look much better.  As you can see we had the beginnings of a stream going down the street.  Ha ha ha… much to our chagrin, you will also notice that now that we have the new garage/barn, we leave the truck parked in the driveway anyway.  (Except when we know it is going to hail since we get golf ball sized hail around here!)


Although Cheeky, Polly, Spot and Molly didn’t seem to mind it at all!  They had a blast bathing and dibbling in standing water that rose to their knees!

Which reminds me… Molly has discovered this week that if she runs fast enough, and flaps her wings hard enough,  that she can make it over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard.  I cannot even begin to describe the look of surprise, nay, SHOCK on the face of my neighbor when he saw her invading is yard.  He just stood there, rooted to the spot and unable to move… I guess he has a real phobia when it comes to geese.  Who knew?

And that brings me to Tuesday morning when it began to rain buckets again!  I looked out to see that there was a moat of debris built up, and it was holding the water causing it to back up into the chicken’s run.  Donning my wellies and grabbing my umbrella, I stood on the porch and listenend for thunder. Hearing none on I went, braving the rain, to break up the dam and save my chicks from wet feet.

Well, I nearly had the job done when I heard this strange sound in the trees behind me.  Sort of electrical, but on a massive scale… I turned in time to see a bolt of lightning materialize out of thin air and stab the earth in three places.  The shock wave from a lightning’s thunder blast of that scale is perceptible  and frightening beyond belief.  I seemed unable to move.  In a book it might read:

She stood there holding her breath, frozen in fear and unable to move.  Then hearing the electricity crawl up and then down again, with a sound not unlike some behemoth generator buzzing behind the trees, she broke inertia and dove into the chicken’s run for safety.

I tried to rationalize what I heard.  I told myself it was harmonics from the sound waves hitting the metal buildings, but the sound was coming from the woods, NOT the buildings…

Intercloud lightnings over Toulouse (France). ...

Image via Wikipedia

So here is what I found out about lightning – and I will not even try to put it into my own words because… I can’t:

“Lightning is usually initiated within the thunderstorm cloud when a faint, negatively charged channel called the stepped leader emerges from the base of the cloud and propagates toward the ground in a series of steps of about 1 microsecond in duration and 150-300 feet in length. The stepped leader reaches from cloud base to ground in about a hundredth of a second. As the stepped leader approaches the ground, streamers of positive charge rush upward from objects on the ground. When one of the streams contacts the leading edge of the stepped leader, the lightning channel is opened, negative charge starts flowing to the ground, and a return stroke, lasting about a tenth of a second, propagates through the channel as a bright luminous pulse.”  *Sometimes, following the initial return stroke, one or more additional leaders may propagate down the decaying lightning channel at intervals of about a tenth of a second. These leaders, called dart leaders, are not stepped or branched like the original leader, but are more or less direct and continuous. Like the stepped leader, however, they initiate return strokes. These return strokes are what we call lightning.”

(From the National Weather Service at: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/fgz/science/lightnin.php?wfo=fgz  )

Right about then I was feeling like this lady…

Needless to say I was ‘adrenalized’ for the duration of the day!

I Later told Bob that my Guardian Angels were “…working at WARP SPEED,”  to which he replied, “Their wings must have been singed too!”

So, after all that, it is good to tell you that our week ended on a sweet and gentle note.  We have a new resident on the Farmlet!

Meet *Little-Bit

Back history:  We lost Fatty Cat about a month ago.  It was the usual story… she went out one night and did not return in the morning.  She has left a hole in our family and was sorely missed by all…  especially Claus who was missing his  playmate.

And so it was, that on Thursday when I took the Boys to the vet for allergies, I chanced to meet Little-Bit…  and realized she needed a home.

Well I ask you… How could I say no?

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* I now believe this was the “electrical behemoth” I heard in the woods.

**Yes, she’s named after that Little-Bit from Fried Green Tomatoes!