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Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2019 3:55 pm
by Primrose
Handsome looking birds. Interesting to see the different types. Are they all busy crowing now the morn8ngs are getting lighter?

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:15 am
by oldherbaceous
Is the egg production still pretty good, Alan?

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:33 am
by alan refail
oldherbaceous wrote:Is the egg production still pretty good, Alan?


140 to 150 a week. All the eggs we can eat and the rest get sold at the door; plenty of regular customers once they discover what a good hen or duck egg should taste like :)

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:46 am
by oldherbaceous
That's brilliant, Alan, glad you and your customers are satisfied.... :)

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 7:55 am
by oldherbaceous
Are you getting stocked up with egg boxes, Alan, now the egg production will soon be in full flow.... :)

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 8:42 am
by alan refail
oldherbaceous wrote:Are you getting stocked up with egg boxes, Alan, now the egg production will soon be in full flow.... :)

Lots of our kind customers bring us bags of egg boxes, so less for us to buy.
We're getting up to 26 eggs a day now, but no trouble selling them. Plenty of regular customers and every week at least one new one. One new lady turned up yesterday and said she had to have our eggs as supermarket eggs were not very nice.
Latest addition to the flock are four young Black Copper Marans. They won't be laying their (hopefully) very dark brown eggs for another month or so. The picture is not one of ours, but it's what ours will look like when they're fully grown.

Image

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2019 9:09 am
by robo
Your right alan ,I have eleven chickens I would have more but I'm already breaking the council rules ,I manage to keep both my daughter's and a mate supplied as well as me and my wife there is a big difference between supermarket eggs and fresh ones

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 8:47 am
by alan refail
My son's plan with the new Marans is to cross them with the Cream Legbar cock to produce MarsBars. No, that's not a joke; if all goes well the blue egg genes of the Legbars and the dark brown genes of the Marans should produce olive green eggs.

Image

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 9:15 am
by oldherbaceous
That's interesting Alan, please keep us updated as things progress....sounds as if they are giving you all plenty of pleasure, and you can't ask for a lot more than that out of life....

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 11:18 am
by Primrose
Isn't it amazing that we actually managed to survive as a trading nation before all these regulations were enforced? I grant that in certain cases of animal welfare and food safety certain standards need to exist but in some areas it often seems to me that whole sub industries seem to be created just to allow existing practices to continue.

As the old song goes. "It all makes work for the working man to do". Rather a case of "real jobs" and "pseudo jobs" though.

Alan, if your local shops arent allowed to sell them because of regulations and you end up with an unwanted surplus, ask the shops to display a poster along the lines of "If you want delicious freshly laid hen and duck eggs, buy them fresh where they were laid from Alan at xxxxxxxxxx..,".

More than one way of skinning a cat !

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:13 pm
by tigerburnie
alan refail wrote:My son's plan with the new Marans is to cross them with the Cream Legbar cock to produce MarsBars. No, that's not a joke; if all goes well the blue egg genes of the Legbars and the dark brown genes of the Marans should produce olive green eggs.

Image

The chocoholic in this house(not me) says you can call them what you like, but they aren't Mars Bars lol.

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:44 pm
by Geoff
Will he have them laying chocolate eggs in 4 weeks (or is it a week tomorrow?).

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 2:28 pm
by Primrose
Olive green eggs! People be queueing up for them in Harrods & Fortnum & Masons! You'll obviously have to get yourself an introduction to one of the chefs on these Tv cooking programmes. We'll look forward to hearing the results of his experiments.

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 2:59 pm
by robo
I must admit blue eggs cause a bit of a stir ,the first question most people ask when seeing one is "what do they taste like " to which I normally answer with EGGS

Re: New kids on the block - New birds in the flock

Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 3:42 pm
by Primrose
I think the issue here is that we are conditioned by habit to expect our food and vegetables to be a certain colour and when the ordinary rule book is thrown away people tend to be very suspicious and expect them to taste like "queer gear" as I once heard somebody call any food that looked out of the ordinary.

I recall some years ago when Iwas growing yellow tumbling tomatoes in patio pots my window cleaner, who was obviously not a gardener asked what the yellow berries were. I told him "tomatoes" and when he looked at me in disbelief saying "but tomatoes are red", I invited him to taste one and check it out . He clearly thought I was trying to poison him and was only convinced when I popped one into my own mouth and ate it.

So I suppose in some ways, we do eat with our eyes as well as our mouths. A blind person, of course, would not suffer these misconceptions.

Whilst on the subject of eggs, I can,t help commenting that it's very rare these days when we buy our free range eggs in Waitrose that they don't all have brown shells. When I was younger most shells were while, so i wonder ifsome kind of brown food colouring is now standard in commercially produced eggs?