Greg has been gone this week on his annual week-long backpacking trip. This is the 33rd year he & his buddies have picked a national wilderness and gone off on a backpacking adventure. This leaves Peyton and I home to take care of the ranch.
The most we do is go out every evening and collect eggs. We get them from the chicken coop, then the duck coop, then walk around the pasture a little because some of the ducks don’t go back to the coop at night. Instead, they roam the pasture. This make you feel like you are doing an Easter egg hunt every day. Sounds fun at first, but after days, of it not so much. Eventually, they are all collected. Sometimes it takes a little magic to make this happen, LOL, so Peyton thought her princess dress was the appropriate attire for the occasion.
Sometimes we find random surprises while out hunting. For example, this week I looked in the duck tub while collecting eggs and found a turkey that had gotten into the tub, could not get out, and drowned. What are you to do? It happens. I just got a fishing net (because I won’t touch them dead or alive), retrieved the bird, and disposed of it.
Back to collecting eggs. We try to wash the eggs every evening because we typically collect about four to five dozen eggs a day. If we wait until the end of the week to wash them (which I have done before), we will be spending hours at the kitchen sink.
The best way we clean them is simply fill the kitchen sink full of eggs and water, then let them soak while we are washing. This loosens the dirt and makes it easier to scrub. To wash them we just have the water continually running gently and use a good scrub sponge. We spin the egg under the water with one hand while scrubbing the dirt away with the other. The clean eggs then sit on a clean towel to dry. Once they are all clean and have dried, we place them into cartons, duck eggs together and chicken eggs together.
There are some distinctions between duck and chicken eggs to make the sorting process easier. Duck eggs are larger and not a pure while colored shell. They are more of a cloudy dirtier color. Chicken eggs are smaller and a pure white color or brown. Currently, we mostly have white and brown egg layers. We have one or two older green egg layers still out in the flock because we do get a few green eggs, but not many.
As the week goes on the, stack of eggs for sale grows. We have several regular customers that come and get eggs. Chicken eggs sell for $4 a dozen, and duck eggs sell for $6 a dozen. What isn’t sold by Friday each week is then sold to another farmer that has booths at the Saturday markets. It works well for us because no eggs are going to waste. For him, he sells out of his eggs each week and still has customers wanting more. Win, win for everyone.
If anyone is ever interested in purchasing eggs, don’t hesitate to reach out, we love new customers!!
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