Search Results for: label/eggs

100 results

Why Urban Farm?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
RLeave a comment
...y to our fellow creatures as we can. After all, aren’t simple comfort and dignity among the most important things we wish for ourselves and our children?” It is with this desire to know the food we eat–if just for eggs in our case–that we’ve begun our own urban small stock journey. Welch concludes his essay eloquently, “I have a lot more death in my life than I did before. And, ironically, that’s part of the reason w...

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Coffee Chaff Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
14 Comments
A hen checks out her fluffy new digs: coffee chaff bedding Image shamelessly stolen from Lyanda Haupt’s Tangled Nest blog Mrs. Homegrown here: Deep litter in the chicken coop is good for chicken health, general aesthetics and good neighbor relations. Chickens need to scratch, so giving them lots of stuff to scratch is kind. It also absorbs odor and protects stray eggs from breakage. Even better, their constant scratching combines their...

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Meet My Chickens: the continuing story of Chickenzilla

Homegrown Neighbor
Animals, Chickens
9 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor here. My chicken Whitey, a.k.a. Chickenzilla, has been laying some wonderful eggs lately. Of course, she is a meat chicken, not a layer. I think of her as a “rescue” chicken. Most meat chickens are harvested between just 7 and 10 weeks of age. At over a year old now, Chickenzilla is likely one of the oldest broiler hens alive.  But she is a surprisingly good layer, with a big, bad-ass personality to match her im...

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Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

Homegrown Neighbor
Animals, Chickens
4 Comments
...f L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts meetup group is just for people in the Los Angeles area. Not to worry if you aren’t in L.A., I noticed a l...

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Thoughts On the Egg Recall

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
11 Comments
...ple get sick rather than 2,000. I can also keep a better eye on my flock’s health and rodent issues than can a minimum wage employee in charge of 10,000 hens. A small farmer has the same advantages–literally fewer eggs in one basket. I went on to get up on my high horse and suggested that our current agricultural system goes against nature. As Heraclitus puts it, “Though the logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, How-to
16 Comments
...your beans in all their wonderful juice and ladle this over cooked rice. Or polenta. Or couscous. Or whatever grain you’re eating these days. Or wrap the rice and beans in flour tortillas and you’ve got burritos. Eggs are good on top of beans. We tend to forget this, outside of huevos rancheros. If you like runny yolks, poach an egg and put it on top of a bowl of hot beans and let that yolk mix with the bean broth. A fried egg with a...

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Asian Citrus Psyllid Eradication Program Causes Outbreak of Citrus Leafminer

Mr. Homegrown
Pests
2 Comments
...g off the leafminers’ natural enemies, allowing the pest to increase in numbers.” The moral, in my opinion, is the same for both nature and the economy: don’t tinker with complex systems and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket, i.e. crop monocultures. Doing so is asking for “black swans” and catastrophic failure. As Nassim Taleb says, “counter-balance complexity with simplicity.” The race to layer insecti...

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A Prickly Situation

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
RLeave a comment
...late spring the plant produces new leaves which can be harvested and eaten. Stores and street vendors sell them as “Nopolito”. Nopolito, tastes a bit like a slightly slimy green pepper and can be used in scrambled eggs and mixed with tomatoes and onions in a salsa. During the summer the very tasty fruit matures and can be eaten raw, although the abundant seeds make it a bit of an acquired taste. The fruit can be made into a jam, a dri...

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Bagrada, The Bad News Bug

Homegrown Neighbor
Gardening, Pests
5 Comments
...er they suck juices out of a plant. The nymphs are small and resemble a ladybug. Mature bagradas are black with orange markings and look like a beetle. They are often seen in mating pairs. They reproduce quickly and lay their eggs in the soil. Apparently insecticidal soap can help control them but, because they are so new to the U.S., little is known about their ecology here. I hope some natural predators show up on the scene soon! I’m try...

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