Egg Share

Recently Tim and I joined an egg share. Structured like other CSA programs, members pay in advance and week by week receive their share. Joining the egg share has added a nice piece of routine to our Sundays. After church we drive to the farm and chat with our chicken farmer (who also happens to be Botanie's very own office manager), Heather. The boys, in their Sunday best, get in with the "girls," as Heather calls her hens. They scatter wheat or sunflower seeds, they check the egg mobile for the day's offerings, they laugh at hens taking dirt baths. Sometimes folks throw stale baguettes, yellowing kale stems or peach peels over the fence. It's fun to watch the scrum that follows. The hens are hilarious, running hither and yon in a flurry of dust and feathers, snatching bits of the precious garbage from each other. Sometimes we are all bent double laughing at the sight. They look like ladies who have hitched up their bustles and are running full tilt about the yard. If you've ever seen Lady Cluck taking on the Rhino guards in Disney's 1973 version of Robin Hood, you have some idea what these grand gals look like when there is baguette to be had.

There are plenty of folks around this town who are far more (and admirably) connected to their food source than we are, but it has been wonderful to make this small step, to know our farmer - as the bumper sticker enjoins -and to get to know the quirky birds who lay our breakfast. And speaking of breakfast, I should add the other benefit that comes from being part of the egg share: eating real eggs. Turns out those things called eggs at the grocery store aren't. There's a world of difference in color and taste between what Heather's Heritage Hens lay and every other cartoned dozen I've bought, even those labeled "naturally nested" or "grain fed."

So between having the boys gather eggs in their Sunday finery to frying up something with a center the color of a mango, there's nothing not to love about being connected with Heather and her scrappy, sqwaky, group of feathered gals. But word to the wise, don't stand in the way if a nearly inedible treasure has just sailed over the fence, these hens mean business.

Heather, some of her girls, and the egg mobile

Hunting for eggs