My Recipe for (Almost) Free Eggs

With everybody except the oligarchs worried about the price of eggs, I’m remembering the happy years that I spent in the company of hens. They were Buff Orpingtons—matronly, butter-colored birds with relatively calm personalities. Not only did they give us eggs, they were the hub of our backyard ecology, transmuting bolted lettuce and rotten tomatoes into a rich compost that ensured an abundant vegetable harvest every year. Sound tempting ? Here is what to do:

1. Go out and buy a few hens. Where chicken flocks are concerned, small is beautiful, so three or four birds, and certainly no more than a dozen, is best.
2. Build or buy them a shed—nothing fancy, but it does need to be weasel-tight and, if you live in a climate where there’s snow on the ground in winter, reasonably roomy. Birds, like all of us, need space to move around. (On second thought, get the shed first, then get the hens.)
3. Beg, or purchase, a bale of old hay from a farmer and scatter it over the floor of the shed. This will be the hens’ bedding.
4. Once the girls are installed, deposit on their bedding apple cores, potato peels, egg shells (a recyclable source of calcium that the hens will use to make more eggshells), leftover pizza, spaghetti, whatever. This is where the magic begins. The hens will relish your leftovers. They will scratch for seeds in the hay, in the process turning the bedding and shredding into perfect compostable bits. (A reasonable amount of laying mash is a good addition to their diet, and remember to give them plenty of fresh, clean water.)
5. As the hens poop nitrogen-rich droppings onto the bedding, do not change the bedding, but let it accumulate, adding more hay on top as needed.
6. In the spring, cart your hen-made compost to the garden and get ready for the harvest of a lifetime.
7. Get a new bale of hay for the hens. Collect gone-to-seed lettuces, carrot tops, and spent broccoli plants from the garden and offer them to your flock so that the cycle may begin again.
8. Wait! I forgot the eggs! When the sun goes down, enter the chicken coop with your little egg basket. Collect the hen fruit. Depending on the color of the hens’ plumage, the shells will be white, brown, rosy beige, or greenish blue. But no matter the color of the shell the yolks, especially if the birds have had some access to grass and bugs, will be bright yellow-orange, and delicious. Also, as you collect the eggs and close the shed for the night, note the soothing, crooning sounds of the hens going to roost. There is no better lullaby for the world weary than the sound of a hen getting ready for bed.

Reality check: young hens (known as pullets) will lay like a house on fire for their first year or two, but then they begin to slow down. Like human females, they can live for years after menopause. Your decision then is to let them age in place, continuing to feed them until they die of natural causes, or to turn them into soup. This is by far the hardest part of keeping poultry.

About roosters: to produce eggs, a hen needs a rooster like a fish needs a bicycle. If you want fertile eggs, however, a rooster is essential. Roosters are also useful in other ways. They are very good at keeping watch for predators while their wives feed, and they take responsibility for leading them into the coop in the evening. But they are apt to be trigger happy towards the flock’s caretaker. My milking pail had a dent in it from when I threw it at an aggressive rooster we called the Ayatollah. And roosters are sexually insatiable. One rooster to a dozen hens is a good ratio to keep him from stressing the girls. I had to get rid of my last rooster because he fell in love with one special hen, forswearing all the others, and was killing her with his attentions.

I can think of no better project for a gardener in these anxious times than poultry keeping, and this is the time of year when farm supply stores sell day old-chicks. Think about it! You’ll get compost for the garden, eggs for the table, and companionship for your soul.