Blue Tamago

Weyhey! Welcome to a new section. I'll be utilising my several years of higher education in bringing to you information on chickens, sourced from research articles. I never knew there was a journal of British Poultry Science! So why research articles and not books? Well, articles go through a peer review process before publication. Yes, I've felt the pain of submitting an article, only for it to be rejected, the pain of reviewers asking for more tests, more corrections and data. All requested by people who work in the field and try and improve the quality of the article.  I've contributed to book chapters, but the one's I have done are basically a review of the current published literature. I'm not so sure about stand alone books, does it just get reviewed by the editor? I mean, there are some books out there that just give bad information (anyone remember that paleo diet cookbook that got pulled from the shelves?) . Anyway, I'll talk about a topic I fi...

Yup the title says it all. These are the ultimate breakfast buns. Yummy tasty eggs from your girls encased in a sweet brioche like golden bun. You can make them the day before and warm them up the next morning, but I warn you, they don't last long out of the oven! The trick is to make firm scrambled eggs, with very little milk or cream. Alternatively, you could make an omelet square and wrap that in the dough. Speaking of the dough, this is a sweet dough that goes really well with savoury or sweet fillings. In fact, you would find this sort of dough is Asian bakeries. It is slightly sweet, fluffy and moist. I've finally got all the proportions right with this dough.

I've seen some pictures of chicken swings on the internet and people say that their chickens love it. So I decided to make one for Buffy's group.  

Awful news, Houdini has gone over the rainbow bridge. They were out on their supervised free range time today and two dogs appeared.

Who says chickens are dumb? Check out Flopsy, who decided that a wet and rainy day outside was not for her.

It's time to celebrate! Our little Goldilocks is now a young lady! Hmm..is it me or do Pekins have this perpetual terrified or startled look?  Anyway, I digress... Looked into the nest box and found a little egg amongst the Leghorn and Maran eggs.

Some time ago I decided to put in little compost piles into each of the chicken runs. Considering the amount of poos that they do, out kitchen scraps and the garden weeds, we managed to fill them up pretty quickly. Once one is "full" we stop filling it and start up on a new one. We then wait for the chickens to amuse themselves by digging through it. And yes, did they like it! Starting with just a piece of fence material held in a "C" shape with some pegs, we filled it with everything. Currently it is winter here and so it is citrus season. Some gardening books say to limit the amount of citrus peel going in, but we're pretty much emptying a bucket of peels into the compost every few days. It starts empty from this: To this: I have to say, the peel breaks down really well. What I have found that doesn't break down are broccoli stems, cabbage leaves and corn cobs. All the straw is from Penguin's coop and all that chicken poo really helps to ...