vituperation

So.

After my grand treatise on why we have chickens, I happened to be on the phone with my dad, when the subject of factory-farmed chickens came up. He told me that my cousin owns three chicken houses.

And each one holds 20,000 meat chickens. They’re raised for eight weeks on three-quarters of a square foot each (for reference, your monitor screen is probably at least twice that big), then sent for processing, where they become pretty little packages with “Tyson” imprinted on the top.

The opinion of people in the know is that Frick is, alas, not a rooster.

(S)he still hasn’t started laying though, so there’s hope.

I find about seven eggs a day now.

I started working on a shed for tractor and garden implements last weekend. I have since learned a few valuable lessons.

First, trying to get something level on ground that’s not level, is a pain in the ass. And not a normal pain in the ass, like having to fill hummingbird feeders every day while your wife lollygags in Maine, either. I’m talking about a “get so mad you stomp around the yard cussing until you trip over a box of joist hangers and crack your knee on a sheet of OSB flooring” pain in the ass.

Second, deciding to build one section of the shed base on the driveway because it’s level, with the plan to drag the base a hundred yards is stupid. Why? Because treated wood weighs at least double what untreated wood does, so even a little 6′x12′ base weighs about four hundred pounds. Trying to lift one end of that and pull it by hand might (a) cause you to stumble around gasping for five minutes after only going twenty feet, and (b) cause the neighbors to look at you funny. Thank God for tractors.

Third, trying to level a rigid base you built on the driveway and dragged out to the field is nigh impossible if you’re inexperienced and impatient. Digging this corner, shimming that corner, and each time you have to lift the fucking thing up to do it. Trying to level something this way may cause you to kick said base so hard you worry that you’ve broken a toe. It may also lead you to devise a better plan for your shed, such as to build it as a pole building instead of as a framed building resting on skids.

This, of course, brings you to lesson four: pulling 3-inch long 10d nails out of wood is a nightmare. Especially when you have eight nails per joist hanger and 29 joist hangers to do, plus the flooring. A man might get so frustrated during this that he’d fling his hammer into the underbrush at the edge of the property, then get poison ivy trying to retrieve it.

Hi all, the email I sent on Monday began.

Several of our chickens have started laying, and we’re getting more eggs than we can eat. As such, I’m offering fresh eggs for sale for $2 / dozen. Most of the eggs are small (new layers, remember), and are blue, cream, tan, pink, and dark red-brown. We get the occasional double-yolk egg, and the occasional large one. Our chickens are probably the most pampered in the state, and they eat grass, bugs, garden scraps (they’re partial to tomatoes and melons), table scraps, and supplemental feed.

Right now I have one dozen, which I can bring in tomorrow, and expect to have anywhere from 1-3 dozen a week available on a first-come / first served basis. If you’re interested in getting eggs in the future, you can send me an email and I’ll bring them in when they’re available. For the dozen I have right now, a phone call would probably be quickest to claim them.

I also included a couple of pictures with the email, one of the girls eyeballing me through the fence and one of a dozen multi-colored eggs. I sent the email to everyone who works with me, roughly seventy-five people.

I learned a lot when I sent that email.

For one, the lack of response was staggering. Out of about seventy-five people, one person called about buying the dozen I had. That’s it, just the one call. Two people expressed interest via email in possibly getting eggs in the future.

I also got:

- several emails from people who didn’t know eggs came in colors other than white, and wanted to know if the brown / blue / pink / speckled / cream / tan eggs tasted different.

- an email from someone who thought you needed a rooster for eggs and therefore wanted to buy a couple of eggs to hatch.

- a call from someone who clucked at me and hung up.

- called “Farmer Fred” more than once, with an accompanying rendition of “Green Acres”.

- clucked at when I walked through my customer’s office.

I was pretty surprised by the lack of interest, because I assumed that people would clamor for fresh eggs from happy chickens that eat grass, bugs, and garden scraps. I was even more surprised that people didn’t know about multi-colored chicken eggs. Heck, even I knew that before I decided to get chickens, and I don’t know much of anything.

The responses kind of reinforced to me the notion that we Americans are too far removed from our food. Interestingly, the lady who bought the dozen I had called me within two minutes of me sending the email, to excitedly ask if I’d sold them yet. She’s not American; she’s Korean. Her first question, after asking if I’d sold the eggs yet, was “do you keep the chickens in cages?”

She boiled the eggs and offered them to people at lunchtime. Since then, I’ve gotten a little more interest, and questions about why the yolks are so bright (”like sunshine,” someone said). Another person was surprised that the white of the blue egg was white, “just like a store egg.” She thought it would be blue.

If you’re curious, the yolks are so bright for a couple of reasons. First, all the grass and bugs and vegetable scraps my girls get make these eggs have a slightly different composition from factory eggs. There are more omega-3 fatty acids in my eggs, as well as more vitamin E and beta-carotene. I suspect the last one is what helps the most with the color. Second, my eggs are fresher than store eggs, by a long shot. Store cartons are stamped with a “use by” date that’s 45 days from when they’re put in the carton. Time fades all things, but especially egg yolks.

I know I work in one of Alabama’s most urban areas, but still, it was really surprising to find out how little people know about available foods. Not that I’m putting those people down, by any means. I just thought it was interesting.

Without fail, every person who ate one of the boiled eggs said good things about them — and not to me, so I’m assuming that they were unbiased opinions. Yet only one more person committed to buying a dozen (the Korean lady asked for a second dozen, too).

The person who bought the next dozen told me that people said they thought $2 was “too expensive” for a dozen eggs.