Egg hunting.

Can it get any better than having egg hunts every day?

After dinner the kids head out to the chicken barn to pick the eggs. In average they would pick around 100 eggs every day. Then farmer Steve washes and sorts them, putting away the cracked ones, and we help out with packaging them into cartons.

Today we took about 53 dozens to the Medina Square farmer's market, and by 10 am there were no eggs left. They were, indeed, a very hot item!
Due to the food safety regulations, these delicious, organic, as fresh as it gets eggs cannot be sold. So, in order to go around this regulation and be able to bring the eggs to the market, "Earth Song" has to sell them by donations. What that means is that people give whatever amount they feel like giving when they get their eggs. In average it would be somewhere between $2.00 and $5.00.

Since organic eggs go so well, farmer Steve got another 100 chickens today. It totals to 300 now.
Those chickens that were brought in are very fortunate. They got to "chickens and all living things paradise" and will have a great life here on the farm.

Another woofer who is staying on the farm, also named Steve, a young 2o yo college student, is a vegetarian. He was telling me in the car that he had gotten a bit disturbed by watching how the chickens were being caught and put into cages. The chicken farm that sold those new chickens is a large operation, they hatch about 100,000 chickens every week. So, they have no time to play with them. Mirek was telling me that he was amazed to watch the workers catch the birds by their leg, one after another, so quickly that in no time they were done. And because inhumane handling of the animals was one of the reasons for young Steve to become a vegetarian, he was concerned.

On a happier note, Ivana came up with a poem, dedicated to the chickens. Here it comes:

"The Boastful Chicken" (by Ivana P.)

The boastful chicken sat on the rock,
Making the sounds knock, knock, knock.
Then another chicken said it was three o'clock.
The boastful chicken was in shock!
"It's three o'clock!".

And I am saying, "It's 12 o'clock! I am in shock!"