I’m always searching for
plants to add to the forest pasture and
produce more of our chicken feed on the farm, so I was thrilled to see
that Darren has compiled a list
of plants for the chicken run on his blog.  While you
should go check out the whole list, here are a few highlights that I’m
considering adding to our system:

• Darren
  notes that bamboo is useful
  for fast-growing shade and wind protection,
  but we’ve actually been thinking of planting edible-shoot bamboo in the
  forest pasture for another reason.  Not only can we eat the shoots
  and use the heavy canes for light structures, the traditional
  diet of wild chickens includes a lot of bamboo seeds.
• Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus) are something
  I’ve been considering planting for our own table, but am a bit leery of
  the reports of their invasiveness.  I figure that plants strong
  enough to be termed invasive are a good choice for the chicken pasture
  since they’ll stand up to heavy scratching.
• I root out burdock
  everywhere else, but it sounds like the weed is another good choice for
  the chicken pasture since poultry like the taste of the leaves and the
  plants are tough to kill.

What kind of plants have
you found that are able to stand up to the abuse of chicken feet and
still provide tasty food for the flock?

I’m quite happy with my
current
method of shelling
fresh, hard-boiled eggs, since it’s fast and gets
out all the
whites, but the result isn’t suitable for deviled eggs.  So when I
stumbled across this
method of making
your fresh eggs easier to shell, my ears perked
right up.



According to Harold
McGee, author of On
Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, the
problem with shelling fresh eggs isn’t lack of an air pocket, but is
instead an acidic albumen (egg white.)  Hard-boil a fresh egg with
an acidic albumen, and the whites will bind to the membrane of the egg
and be impossible to peel.  Over time, the albumen’s pH naturally
rises, making the proteins in the whites bind to themselves rather than
to the membrane — suddenly, the egg is peelable.



McGee’s solution is
simple — add half a teaspoon of baking soda to
each quart of water you plan to boil your fresh eggs in.  This
raises the pH of the water, which makes the albumen less acidic, and
makes your eggs easier to peel.  As you can see from this photo,
the blogger who turned me on to the new hard-boiling method got very
pretty eggs by following McGee’s advice.

We don’t have any spare eggs
to hard-boil at the moment since our
chickens are in the midst of their molt,
but this trick is definitely worth saving for future
experimentation.  In the spring, I always want to get rid of my
excess eggs by bringing deviled eggs to potlucks, but the idea of
painfully peeling them all holds me back.  Maybe in 2011, deviled
eggs will become our primary potluck item.



As a side note, I
couldn’t resist throwing in this video showing Tim
Ferriss’s method of shelling hard-boiled eggs.  It’s just crazy
enough to work.