Welcome to The Yardstead
The eggs shown here are all from free-range chickens here at the Yardstead. You can see they are all different colors including green, blue, pink, beige, brown and white. They vary in size a bit as well. They all look the same on the inside though, and taste the same, which is far better than mass produced eggs from large poultry farms. They have more flavor and many studies have shown they are more nutritious.
The first thing most people notice when they crack open one of our fresh chicken eggs is the thickness of the shells. Because these chickens eat a more varied diet than "sweat shop" chickens, they get more nutrients such as calcium (good for shells) in their diet. The fresh egg yolks also look different. They are more orange than yellow and appear thicker.
I was going to crack a store bought egg and one of our's side by side on a plate to illlustrate the difference, but I couldn't bring myself to buy eggs at the store. It is interesting to see them together. I will post a picture for comparison later in the forum. I'll just borrow a store bought egg from a neighbor.
One of our goals here at the Yardstead is to produce as much of our own food as possible. By growing our own groceries we have much more control over what we put into our bodies. We feed our chickens mostly garden waste, grass clippings, food scraps and occasionally scratch feed to supplement when things are slow in the garden.
We have been raising chickens here at the Yardstead for over 4 years now. We started with 12 chicks from Murray McMurray Hatchery. The minimum order for baby chicks from Mcmurray is 25 but that's more than we wanted to start out with. A friend offered to split the order so we each picked several varieties from the catalog and placed the order. I don't remember the particular breeds from the first order (my wife actually picked), but they were all hens listed as good layers. We didn't want to get any roosters mainly because we did not want to listen to the crowing. The baby chicks were shipped overnight and the post office called me the next morning and said they were holding a box for me at the front counter and that it was chirping. I sped over and picked up the package and opened it as soon as I got in the truck. There were 25 lively chicks inside. I took them home and put them in a larger box with a small waterer and food dish. It was the end of winter so we kept them inside in their box for several weeks. All of the chicks we ordered for the yardstead survived to adulthood, and all but one of the chicks my friend ordered survived. In fact two of our current chickens are from this original order.
We purchased more chicks the next year from a local feed store after an unexpected event caused a rapid drop in our chicken population.....
We love trees here at The Yardstead. We have added several trees to our landscape over the last several years. In keeping with our policy of Edible Landscaping, most of the recent additions have been fruit trees. Although we are located in north Florida, we still have to consider the cold hardiness of trees and all the plants we plan to cultivate. We have had several frosts this year including a 2 day stretch where the temperature was below freezing for four to five hours each night. Frosts are not uncommon in January and February around here, but by noon the temperature is usually back up around 50F at least. Considering the dozen or so frosts we have had this year, maybe 4 or 5 of the days saw freezing or below temps for 4 hours or more. It was cold enough however to damage several of our young citrus trees.
The lemon tree seen here on the left appears to have survived the best out of all our citrus trees. I believe this is a Myers Lemon. It was started from a seed left over after my wife sliced up a lemon grown on a local tree known to be at least 30 years old. It is three years old and has never produced fruit. It suffered a little frost damage last year also and I pruned it back a bit to much. It lost some leaves this year and some parts of the branches have turned brown, but I will wait until after the spring to prune it this time. By then I should be able to tell better what is actually dead. I believe the older (year or longer) branches have a better chance of growing fruit, so I want to prune them as little as possible. This is something that I need to look up about pruning citrus.
Most of our other citrus trees....
