Simpler Living
By Fiona Wagner • Bankrate.com

The signs of spring are everywhere: the snow is melting, the sun shines longer each day, and the farm co-op finally has the spring hatchery catalogue in stock. It's time to order some baby poultry, folks.

Like many new homesteaders, our first barnyard addition was a flock of chickens. It was fall, and our local hatchery was done selling day-old chicks for the season, so we decided to buy 10 one- and two-year-old layers from a local hobby farmer.

She sold us a mix of Barred Plymouth Rocks, Rhode Island Reds and Black-Sex Link hens, dual-purpose birds raised for both eggs and meat. We housed them in a spacious, well-lit and draft-free pen in the barn, equipped with homemade nesting boxes and a ladder-style perch for nighttime roosting. Within a week, we were collecting between seven and nine eggs daily that were all technically brown but displayed an incredible range of colours, shapes and textures.

We'd heard people rave about how much better fresh eggs tasted compared to store-bought ones, so we tried an unscientific side-by-side comparison of one to the other. The results were startling.

Break a fresh egg into a dish, and you'll find a white that's compact and firm, the perfect backdrop for a rich orange yolk that's positively perky. Aging eggs feature thin shells, runny whites and flat yolks.

We tried a blind taste test with our kids, ages seven and four. The farm eggs won in flavour, hands down (our eggs didn't require any ketchup to taste delicious).

But not only do farm-fresh eggs taste richer and creamier, they're also better for you. According to a recent Mother Earth News study, hens raised on pasture (versus factory-farmed battery hens raised intensively in cages) produce eggs with less cholesterol and fat and more vitamin A, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, beta carotene and vitamin D.

Part of the difference has to do with how the hens are raised, but it's also a matter of freshness. An egg is at its best quality the moment after it's laid. Most store-bought eggs are weeks old. You do the math.

From chick to chicken
A pullet (or female chicken less than a year old) starts laying when she's about 20 to 24 weeks old and will produce about 20 dozen eggs during her first year (as long as she gets 14 hours of natural or artificial light each day). After a molt at around 18 months, she will start laying again, producing about 16 to 18 dozen eggs in her second year before production gradually starts to decline. 

While we're still getting between four and five dozen eggs each week, our girls are getting a bit long in the tooth. Since it's not economically feasible to run a retirement home for chickens, once a hen stops laying, she'll be processed (a euphemism for being butchered) for the soup pot.