Safe Egg Handling

This topic seems to keep cropping up, so I am blogging about it again.

With all the "keeping chickens" craze that seems to be exploding, there come questions of all sorts. Two common ones are:

• Should I refrigerate my eggs?
• Should I wash my eggs? If so, when? Before or after refrigeration?

There are as many answers to those questions as there are bloggers in the blogosphere. Here is my take on the topic, based on my many years as a 4-H poultry leader, longtime breeder of poultry, and farmwife for more than a decade now.

If you are raising your own chickens and want to know if you should wash/refrigerate your own eggs, or if you're buying eggs from a local farmer, the answers are the same.

Yes, you should refrigerate the eggs. They'll stay fresher longer that way, and taste better.

Yes, you should wash the eggs. But here's the thing, do it after they've gotten cold in the fridge, and just before use. 

Why, you ask? When a hen lays an egg, she deposits this lovely mucoidal coating on them called the "bloom", which gives the egg a seal that prevents most bacteria from entering, and yet which allows the egg to breathe. Eggs are porous, and do need to breathe, otherwise the developing embryo (assuming the egg has been fertilized) can't grow. That's the point of a hen laying an egg, to hatch a chick, so all hens do this.

However, the bloom isn't airtight, it's not made of plastic, and as such it does breathe. And if left out on your kitchen counter, an egg will slowly get stale, because it is absorbing air over time. They also lose flavor if stored at room temperature on the counter, and can absorb whatever odors are in the air (if you cook onions a lot, in theory, your countertop stored eggs could absorb some of that odor.)

So you should really put your eggs in the fridge. But don't wash them before you do so, because once an egg is washed, the bloom is removed, and the evaporation process speeds up and they get staler faster, and will also absorb odors from the fridge faster.

The thing to do is, collect your eggs, gently wipe off any excess dirt/feces with a dry piece of paper towel or cloth, put them in a clean egg carton, and put them in the fridge. Then, once they're good and cold, and just before using them, wash them in very hot water with a little dish soap.

The hot water on the cold egg prevents germs and dirt from being sucked into the egg, and allows it to be washed off. And the egg will be fresher because you've kept it in the fridge and delayed the evaporation process. I posted this picture before, but will do so again, because it demonstrates how the air cell in an egg increases over time. If left on the counter, that process accelerates, putting the eggs in the fridge delays the process.

I have heard the arguments about "When I lived in Europe (or South America, or wherever) we never put eggs in the fridge." Well, I live in the US (as do the folks I am targeting this blog post to), and here in the US we have different issues with regards to disease - Salmonella that is carried by wild birds and rodents that can get into your chicken coop and infect your birds without you even knowing it.

So when someone tosses that argument at me, I say, it's not germane to discussions about chickens in the US. There have been a number of outbreaks of Salmonella in the US this year (and previous ones), I was even asked to sit in on a conference call earlier this year with the CDC regarding same. It's here, and we have to deal with it using safe handling measures for our chickens and their eggs.

Bottom line folks: put the eggs in the fridge, and wash just before use. They'll stay fresher, and you'll stay healthier. 

Layers of time

I am sitting at the desk in the living room of a cottage by the sea. A cottage which I first came to as an infant, with my parents, as they came to visit my mother's parents, who had purchased it just the year before I was born.

My maternal grandfather went to this particular beach on the Outer Banks when he was a young man, visiting his relatives in Elizabeth City. He came here before there was a bridge, when a ferry deposited people on the Sound side of the island. When this house, one of the original 13 in Nags Head, came up for sale, he snapped it up, to no small consternation among the locals, no doubt, as he was a "Yankee." But he made it their, and our own, and I am incredibly blessed to have been able to share this house with my extended family over the years.

I figure, since I am now 55, I have been here roughly 50 or so times in my life, give or take. There were some summers I missed a trip here, for one reason or another. But as I sat on the front porch the other night, about to have my picture taken with my daughters, it struck me with great force that time falls in layers, and I could feel them settle on me as I sat.

I can remember when there was only one stoplight on the island. No MacDonalds, no "French Fry Alley" as we call it, no big grocery stores, just the little mom and pop store down the road where Mr. Harris ground his own beef, twice! When the dunes across the road weren't covered with timeshares, and you could walk all the way across to the sound and dig clams to bring home to eat. Can't do that now, oh no.

As I walked upstairs this morning, I thought about how many times my feet had trod those wooden stairs, how many times I had looked out the windows at the sea, how unchanging it all is, despite all the change that has gone on around it. When I drive down here, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the development I see, and it makes me feel a little sick inside. But when I make it to the house, and put my feet up on the railing as I sit in one of the wooden rockers on the front porch, all that slips away, and I am back where I need to be.

This place, more than any other, has the sense of "home" for me. It has lasted longer than any other place I have lived, and in the later years of her life, I spent more time with my mother here than any other place. I feel her presence around me everywhere; in the shells I pick up on the beach, in the simple task of hanging laundry on the line (Mom was famous for her Herculean devotion to doing laundry here), in the country store she loved to visit when she was here. She's all around me here, and I hope, one day when I pass, my spirit will, in a small way, linger here as well. For this place, more than any other, is truly Home.

Please put those eggs in the fridge

This post is in response to a host of stuff I've been seeing lately about how folks are keeping eggs they've been buying from local farmers on their counters, thinking that because the eggs come from "pastured" hens that it's ok to keep them unrefrigerated.

Um, no.

Yes, when a hen lays an egg, she deposits this lovely mucoidal membrane on the egg called the "bloom", which does indeed prevent a host of bacteria and other nasties from entering into the egg under normal circumstances. Yes, that means the egg from a local farmer will, generally, stay fresher than an egg which has been washed, as your supermarket egg has been, assuming the local farmer hasn't washed the egg (some have, you'd better ask, because some states require even the small local farmers to wash their eggs before they sell them.)

But just because the bloom is still on the egg doesn't mean you should keep it on your countertop for weeks folks. The bloom is not made of plastic. It is not airtight. It is not going to keep that egg fresh forever. Let's think about this.

The hen laid that egg, in theory, because she wanted to raise a chick. If the egg were coated in an airtight membrane, the embryo inside the egg would never be able to develop, because it wouldn't be able to breathe. And embryos need to breathe in order to grow. It's part of what they do. See the chart below. It's how we chicken farmers can determine the age of an embryo, by how much air has entered an egg!

So folks, please. Put the damned eggs in the fridge, would you? You're making the old chicken farmers like me, with your neo-hippie back to the land eggs on the countertop nonsense, a little crazy. You really will be glad you did.

A Guide to Nutrient Deficiencies

I saw this on Facebook, but it had tiny writing, so I dropped it into Photoshop and added some larger text to it. Please note, if I am infringing on anyone's copyright, please let me know and I'll take it down asap.
Note, this will look awkward once I publish it, as it will bleed over into my avatar, but I want the pic large enough to read, so just ignore that, I did it on purpose.

Here ya go folks:

Healthy: Leaves shine with a rich dark
green color when adequately fed.

Phosphate: Shortage marks leaves with
reddish-purple, particularly on young plants.

Potash: deficiency appears as a firing or
drying along the tips and edges of lowest leaves.

Nitrogen: hunger sign is yellowing that starts at
the tip and moves along middle of leaf.

Magnesium: deficiency causes whitish strips
along the veins and often a purplish color on the
undersides of the lower leaves.

Drought: causes the corn to have a grayish-green
color and the leaves roll up nearly to the size of
a pencil.

Disease: heminthospoium blight, starts in small
spots, gradually spreads across leaf.

Chemicals: may sometimes burn tips, edges of leaves
and at other contacts. Tissue dies, becomes whitecap.

A Ramp to the Past

With one brief blog post, a friend took me back in time to my childhood today. She's a foodie, a writer, and television host, and she put up a post about ramps, an amazing leek-like vegetable that grows wild in the woods of western KY and WV and southeastern OH. As a child I often went on walks with my grandfather in the woods around the family farm.

My grandfather was, among other things, a naturalist, a botanist, and a conservationist before there even was such a word.

Some of my best childhood memories are of time spent with him. He taught me to ride at a very early age. I spent countless hours on the trails with him, and each one was a lesson. He knew every tree, every flower, every bird and animal we came across.

On some of our walks, we hunted the elusive morel mushroom. And ramps, oh just the word brings back that smell! The deep dark soil, the earthy oniony smell, the pungent taste. And today my friend gave me a source for ramp seeds and bulbs, and in doing so turned back the wheel of time and I was that child once more, tagging along behind my grandpa, holding the canvas bag as he foraged. And now I can grow them here on our own farm, and I know my grandpa would love that. Thanks Joyce, I owe you one.

Laura and her grandfather, circa the 1960s.

Avian Haiku

Wren sings full-throated

Hawk sits silent in the tree
Jay screams a warning

Short, but not very sweet

I am creating this post mostly to link to another blogger's blog post. She says it the best, I am just hitching a ride on her wonderful words, and basically linking to it so I won't lose it. 

See this great post by Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist titled:

 "The Four Steps Required to Keep Monsanto OUT of Your Garden"

Read it. Bookmark it. Pin it. Digest it. Don't lose it. Absorb what she's saying here. And when it's time to buy seeds for your own garden (and it's almost time!) use the links she provides to ensure you're buying seeds from The Good Guys.