Kathleen wrote:
>
> Yesterday the kids and the dogs and I drove out to Canine Country to
> purchase my Christmas present - a full membership. It is, in fact, a
> country club for dogs and their people. 225 fenced acres with trails
> for hiking, a pond with a gravel beach for swimming and a regulation
> dock for dock diving, sheep for herding, agility and flyball. They've
> got homing pigeons for use in training hunting dogs - the dog points,
> the hunter triggers some sort of mechanism and the birds come exploding
> out of their cages, then fly back to their coop.

Sounds great...
>
> And, just for the fun of it they've got a big flock of beautiful
> bronze-colored laying hens (and a couple of roosters that I'm scared
> of). They eat bugs and grass and pretty much anything they can scratch
> up in the fenced yard, along with commercial chicken chow. I don't know
> if that counts as free-range or not but they've got pretty good lives,
> all things considered.
>

Well, I think ours would probably be termed "yarded/free-range"
chickens, not bona fide "free-range" chickens. We have a coop which is
in a large fenced in area. They love scratching around in the
grass/weeds/soil for part of the day but go into the coop to lay, take
naps and to sleep in at night. We have to keep them fenced in otherwise
they wander over onto other people's property.... which can be
inconvenient. We also feed them layers mash/pellets and corn too that we
buy at the local feed stores. They get kitchen scraps as treats now and
again - they love leftover cooked rice, so it's probably bad for them
<lol>... they almost fight each other for it! One of them loves tomatoes
too.

> The woman who took my check and application handed me a carton with a
> half dozen petite brown eggs and said there were probably more by now,
> if I wanted to drive up to the barn and check.
>
> So we drove up there and sure enough, collected a half dozen more out of
> the nesting boxes. Tres cool. My daughter picked one up and grimaced.
>
> "Ew. It's warm."

LOL! I can imagine the look on her face.
>
> "Yup. Fresh out of the chicken's bottom."
>
> "Oh, thank you so very much for that."

Yep. Takes a bit of getting used to if you've always lived in a city
>
> This morning I made a cheese omelet with five of them. Smaller than
> store bought, about the size of those in the OP's photo, but the yolks
> were a much deeper gold, almost orange. Excellent flavor, too. Worth
> reserving the fresh eggs for use in omelets and scrambled eggs, and
> using up the store bought ones for baked goods, etc.
>

Yes, pullet eggs are supposed to be the "tastiest", but as I read
somewhere, people are often led to believe that "bigger is better"...

--
Cheers
Chatty Cathy

Garlic: the element without which life as we know it would be impossible