Russian Roulette with Homegrown Eggs

Your own free-range eggs delivered right to your back door: this is one of the benefits of keeping your own chickens. And as a homesteader, you are practically obligated to keep chickens- it’s the first step to having the idyllic Old MacDonald’s Farm. But there is a dark side to having homegrown eggs.

If you have children, you may be familiar with Kinder Surprise eggs, Ferrero’s hollow chocolate eggs containing ‘surprise’ toys within. A Kinder Surprise is an anticipatory, exciting event. There is the chocolate to be eaten, and there is the knowledge that there is an unknown toy waiting to be discovered in the egg’s interior.

Cracking homegrown eggs is like cracking open a Kinder Surprise egg; you are never completely sure what you are going to get.

For someone who has only ever bought clean, sanitised, date-stamped eggs in cartons from the store, it may be surprising to know that cracking a homegrown egg can be risky game of Russian Roulette. There are three possible ‘surprises’ from a homegrown egg:

Cracking Open a Homegrown Egg: The Possibilities

1. The ORDINARY egg– These are the same as any egg you buy from a supermarket. The yolks may be slightly darker or paler in colour, and the egg itself may be warm, straight from the chicken’s bum, but other than that, the round yolk sits perkily in its white in a frypan, nothing out of the ordinary. These ORDINARY eggs are what you get most of the time- safe. Just like MOST of the chambers in a gun used for Russian Roulette are empty- safe.
2. The EXPLODING egg– These eggs are extremely exciting. Old and filled with gas, they will explode upon being touched, the smell from the yellow and black interior putting a person off eggs for many weeks.
3. The FOETUS– Assuming the homesteader in question also keeps roosters, any egg is likely to be fertilised, and if a hen has spent any length of time sitting on the egg, a partially formed FOETUS is a possibility in your breakfast egg. * This can be anything from a yolk thickly streaked with blood vessels to a completely recognisable baby chick.

* The likelihood of receiving a FOETUS is higher for lazy egg collectors who let eggs build up in a nest over a few days.

We have experienced all of these surprises personally. The EXPLODING eggs and the FOETUS eggs have never made it as far as the kitchen- they are the suspicious eggs, hidden in unusual places in the yard, and they are often dirty from spending time outdoors. (Fresh eggs straight from the chicken are nice and clean.)   The FOETUS eggs are most common in a nest where chicks actually hatched, but for whatever reason, the hen leaves the nest before the remainder of the eggs are complete. And if we leave it long enough, when we do the yard clean-up, we can actually encounter a fourth possibility, where the EXPLODING egg and the FOETUS egg combines to become an EXPLODING FOETUS. Lovely.

Possibilites 3 and 4 can, of course, be avoided by NOT HAVING A ROOSTER. But a rooster means chicks which means hens which can take over the laying responsibilities when our other hens are too old.

I must admit, even after 15 years of having chooks, I still feel a slight sense of trepidation everytime I crack one of our own eggs, and I never feel that way with supermarket eggs. Despite all this egg-citement (sorry), we love having our own homegrown eggs.  I guess we’re just a family who likes to live on the edge.

“Do ya feel, lucky, punk?”

“Well? Do ya?”