Meet my bird

Meet my bird. Well, one of my birds.

She’s a 19week old Speckled Maran and she lives with one more like her, 3 Welsummers and a Cockerel named Spatchcock. Every day they give us organic, fresh, free range eggs for the price of a sack of grain and a little bit of love and care.

In the day time they’re free to roam the field, scavenging and making their way up towards the house. As the daylight turns they set off slowly wandering back towards their hutch so that when night falls, we can lock them up safely for the night, away from the foxes. Chicken bliss.

Happy hens really do lay the best eggs. If you’ve never eaten a truly free range egg, you’re missing out! The yolks are naturally deep and colourful, the whites are plump and hold their own when you crack them in to a pan. There’s none of the watery gloop that is often found in store-bought eggs.

As a small holder, I really feel strongly about egg production in the UK. The supermarket value eggs that sell for 10 pence each are an insult to the farmers that care for their flocks. Buying them increases the demand for keeping malnourished, impossibly cramped, factory farmed birds. If you’re ever tempted to buy eggs that cheap, go and look at this blog post and tell me if you’d want to eat an egg from a bird that looked that ill, I know I wouldn’t. Really you should expect to be paying at least 20 pence per egg for the peace of mind that it’s from a healthy, well looked after hen.

I’ll wrap my ranting up there. I just wanted to introduce you all to my birds and let you know that you can expect lots of egg recipes over the next few months. I’ll link them up below as they come up: