Easter Chicks
8 April 2007
What happens if a colored Easter egg hatches? You get colored chickens
of course! That's what happened to these baby chicks, two were born
yellow, two were born red and two were born green. Honest, they were
born that way!
It's not because of the colored eggs though. Before these chickens were
hatched, some colored dye was added inside their eggs. Then when the
chicks hatched, they were these bright colors. They will eventually
return to their normal coloring but for now they are bright Easter
colors.
We were given these chicks by a friend. She owns a recovery center for
troubled children. The children also help out with Critter Corner
which is her traveling petting zoo. For Easter, they had these six
colorful baby chicks. Now that Easter is over, these baby chicks
needed a permanent home. Kona Earth farm seemed like the perfect place.
With these six new chicks, our previous batch of ten baby chicks from
the humane society and our adult hens from the local poultry farm that
was going out of business, we now have 24 chickens. We had
surplus eggs already and once these new chicks start laying we'll
have far more eggs than we can possibly use.
That's ok though because there is a local farmer's market. Running our
own booth at the farmer's market is a large commitment that we're not
sure we're ready for. Almost every other booth there has coffee,
macadamia nuts, bananas, avocadoes and every other seasonal fruit we
would have so making a profit isn't guaranteed. The one item that does
sell really well is free-range chicken eggs. The local mongoose
population makes egg production a challenge and the few farmers that
bring eggs all sell out right away.
If you have ever had free-range chicken eggs you'll know that there is
absolutely a taste difference. There's something about exercise and a
well-rounded diet of insects that can't be reproduced on a commercial
chicken ranch. Free-range eggs are actually lower in cholesterol and
higher in vitamins. I'm sure we'll have no problem selling our chicken
eggs. Even without our own booth, several of the other farmer's would
be happy to purchase our eggs to use in their own baked goods.
These baby chicks won't start laying for several months. Half of them
will probably be roosters that may end up seeing the stew pot. The
other half should give us plenty of healthy, normal-colored eggs.
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