Suburban Free-Range Eggs

Just before leaving for a trip to France, Annah made a last-minute jaunt down to the chicken coupe in our backyard to say goodbye to our feathered friends. “Go see them before we go,” she said after she returned. I opened the cage to find the first egg lying in the corner of the coupe. This is a photograph of the first egg I’ve ever had a part in laying.
Now that we’re home, two of the three chickens are laying every day. It’s getting to the point where we can’t eat the amount of eggs they’re producing, so we’re handing them out as gifts to the neighbors who have had to deal with our “free-range” chickens the most. The first six eggs went to the neighbors whose driveway is decorated with droppings.
The chickens can be a bit of work, but it is strangely rewarding to know we no longer have to spend $3 on “organic free-range” a eggs every week, nor do we have to worry about running out. It’s also nice to know the eggs are coming from healthy chickens who eat the bugs in our yard (and our neighbors) along with a supplement of ground up corn.
I owe my rekindled nostalgia for poultry to my former editor Geoff Hansen who teamed up with writer Jay Rossier to produce the book Living with Chickens a whole book on raising chickens, and more recently pigs, sheep… I used his chicken book as a reference in building my parents coupe almost five years ago.