Home-grown and cured bacon, home-grown eggs, home made sourdough, and home made butter. How much better can Sunday morning breakfast get?

Another newly-discovered local blog, roasting with a trivet, spring bulbs, the egg-bot robot, and some US towns turning their back on federal licensing and inspection regulations for locally-produced food.

It sounds really fancy, but it’s actually just a practical way to use up duck egg yolks after making lots of meringues with the whites! Home made pesto is quick and delicious accompaniment that does the pasta justice.

Our missing hen returns with a pleasant surprise for us – four gorgeous little chicks!

You get a lot of variations in the size, shape and colour of eggs between different breeds of chickens and ducks. There’s a fair bit of natural variation within a breed, and even with eggs from the same bird. Here’s a lineup of some recent eggs we’ve collected.

What I’ve been reading about this week – worming pigs naturally, butchering pigs, sustainable display homes, KiamaSphere, Book Depository, modern homesteading, how to freeze eggs, and the solar nest.

If you’ve got a broody hen, rather than trying to “break her” why not let her raise a clutch of eggs? It requires almost no effort on your part, and is a lot of fun.

This story has been a bit of a saga.

Remember back when I got Molly the leghorn to go broody and slipped some eggs under her? Well, none hatched. I think it was a combination of inexperienced first-time mother and low fertility rate of eggs. She was sitting on 6 eggs: three exploded in the nest [...]

I previously posted asking if anyone had any suggestions on how to make a hen go broody. I got some helpful answers, and did some research, and found a few suggestions:

leave eggs in the nest put golf balls in the nest, so she thinks they’re eggs set up a nice quiet nest in a darkened, sheltered corner [...]

So, after trying to stop a chicken from going broody several times throughout last year, now I want her to go broody and she won’t!

Late last year we got some new chickens – 4 brahma pullets and a rooster to match. We also acquired 3 unwanted ISA brown layers from a friend. So with the [...]