The Minnesota Farm Woman

To call something chicken scratch or chicken feed  used to mean that something was cheap or inexpensive.  I’m here to tell you that those days are over. The price of both feed and scratch has skyrocketed, just like everything else these days. Luckily, I have supplemented their feed with garden vegetables and the gang is  let out of their run every afternoon to gobble up bugs and worms, so that has kept the feed costs down.  Those happy golden days are soon  to be over, since we have already had several frosts here in the north.  The cost wouldn’t seem quite so bad if I had eggs to show for it.  For the last couple of weeks, the chickens have been molting like crazy, the coop is filled with feathers, and they stopped laying.  All of them.  They haven’t stopped eating with their molt, though, and in fact seem hungrier than ever.  At first I was getting two eggs a day, then one, and now none. Zero. Zilch. A big goose….er….chicken egg. To make it worse, we have company coming.  Now, if you were coming to a Farm Woman’s home and all she does is write about her chickens, would you be expecting oatmeal for breakfast? Right. Me neither. I would be expecting exactly what I had planned:  Some sort of cheesy egg bake for breakfast and perhaps devilled eggs with the turkey dinner. Perhaps I should have planned a VERY EXPENSIVE chicken dinner, instead.  Maybe I could find someone else who raises chickens and buy a couple of dozen eggs from them,  putting those large beauties into the fridge.  “Oh, yes!” I would boast, showing them off.  “I have SCADS of eggs.  So many that I just don’t know what to do with them all!”  Another option would be to  just bite the bullet and get the eggs from the grocery store, but when one writes about her life in a small-town newspaper column….well, I can hear it now:  “You’ll never guess who I saw in the store yesterday, and GUESS what she was buying?” and “Farm Woman….pfffttttt! I KNEW she was just had to be making all of that crazy stuff up!” If I did my shopping locally,  I certainly would  have to disguise myself, though.  If you happen to be shopping late at night in the grocery store’s dairy section and see a tall blondish-but-mostly-grey-haired woman wearing a moustache and a trench coat lurking near the eggs, just ignore me…er…her. Don’t ask any questions, don’t laugh, and please don’t call the authorities. I’ve got company coming and I’ve got a lot of work to do before they arrive, and there’s no way my kitchen will be clean enough for company if there are any delays.  There’s a pile of  housework to do, fall gardening chores to finish up,  and I’ve got to dig out my mom’s famous pancake recipe. I think it only calls for two eggs, and I have at least that many in the fridge, maybe. Oh, and one more thing.  I really don’t make this stuff up. Who could? That would take quite a bit of imagination, don’t you think?