Maybe we’re just proud poultry owners, but we think our turkeys have something going on in the brains department. Not the kind of thing that gets you into Yale early admission; more like street smarts.

Smart enough to find the sunny spot

The first day we brought them home, they were on the lookout for an escape route. Now, you could argue that escaping from a warm, predator-proof brooder into a cold, predator-rich world, won’t score you an 800 on the turkey SATs, but we thought that finding the biggest hole in the chicken wire and managing to scramble through it was a notable accomplishment for a bird a week old. Our chickens never showed that much initiative.

They also seem to learn from each other. There’s a lot of turkey-see, turkey-do, whether it’s a new behavior, like jumping up on the roost bar, or something they already know how to do, like eat. If one starts, the others tend to follow suit. Sure, it’s groupthink, but that’s better than no think at all.

They’re alert, aware of what’s going on around them, and engaged with the other creatures who populate their world. When we had them in Turkey Day Camp, they’d hang out on whatever side of their enclosure was closest to the action, whether the action was us watering the garden, the chickens taking a dust bath, or the cat … well, doing what cats tend to do around small birds.

When nothing was going on, they’d peep and peep and peep, but stop immediately if they heard or saw us. Or if they got tired.

But it wasn’t until Kevin finished their new, grown-up pen that we saw their true mettle.

It took us a while to decide just how we were going to house them, but we finally settled on something significantly more permanent than what we had originally envisioned. But we knew our construction plans would be opportunistic, and it happened that opportunity presented itself in the form of cattle panels.

Cattle panels are pieces of galvanized steel fence 16 feet long and 50 inches high, with holes that are 6’x8’. There are a couple extra wires near the bottom that divide the bottommost holes in half so small things can’t escape (or enter). Cattle panels are strong and cheap – about $28. each.

The problem with fences isn’t the fencing; it’s the fenceposts. To keep fencing from falling over, fenceposts have to be big, sturdy, and sunk deep in the ground. But ask yourself: what’s big, sturdy, and already sunk deep in the ground? Trees, of course! We don’t need no stinking fenceposts. All we need are trees that are exactly sixteen feet apart.

We went in search of a spot that was clear of brush, sheltered by leaf cover, and big enough to hold four turkeys. At least, I was looking for a space big enough for four. Kevin was looking for a space big enough for eight, or even twelve.

“Twelve?” I asked.

“Turkeys are pretty easy so far,” he said.

The turkey pen, still under construction

We found a spot just off the driveway, next to where we keep our mushroom logs. A couple of rhododendrons had to be sacrificed, but it was otherwise ready to be turned into a pen.

We bought five cattle panels from Cape Cod Feed and Supply, and a scant two days later Kevin had enclosed the pen, gate and all. The treehouse that will be their nighttime roost isn’t finished yet, so they still go in the brooder at night, but we shut down Turkey Day Camp and put them in their new home during the day.

Yesterday was their first day in the pen, and they seemed to like it. They have room to run around, and they like to fly up to the platform that will be the floor of their treehouse. (They also enjoyed using it as a jumping-off point to fly over the fence until Kevin blocked their escape route.) They scratched and explored, ate leaves and bugs, and seemed curious about their new environment.

The turkeys got the idea that this was their pen and the chickens were intruders.

They weren’t the only ones. As Kevin was taking tools in and out of the pen, he left the gate open and a couple of chickens wandered in. For a while, all the birds went about their business, but then the turkeys got the idea that this was their pen and the chickens were intruders.

They went after them in a posse. They corralled them into a corner and started pecking at them.

The chickens are easily twice the size of the turkeys, and have the wisdom that presumably comes with maturity, but they didn’t even try to exert their superiority. They fled.

I didn’t witness this. Kevin told me about it afterward. But I was there when the cat went into the pen.

She wandered in like she owned the joint, and the turkeys were on her tail immediately. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, more like curious. But the four of them backed her into the same corner the chickens had ended up in, and it seemed to me that no good could come of this stand-off. If the turkeys started pecking at her, it was certainly possible that she could remember that she eats things like them, and we’d have nothing but heartbreak.

I stepped between them, and the cat made for the door.

That was four month-old turkeys, chasing a cat out of their pen. That’s pretty ballsy, I think.

What is it about Kevin and poultry?

It’s possible that we’re so impressed with our turkeys because the many stories of their stupidity had us anticipating four avian idiots. It was the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Our turkeys have turned out to be much better company than we thought they’d be, and we probably spend a little too much time hanging out in the pen watching them watching us. They come over and peck at our toes, and roost on our arms if we sit down. One hopped on Kevin’s shoulder and closely examined his ear.

It’s possible that, because our turkeys aren’t the broad-breasted kind bred for the Thanksgiving table, they’ve hung on to some of the native intelligence of their wild ancestors, but it’s also possible that stories of turkeys’ stupidity are wildly exaggerated.

The chickens haven’t given up on peaceful coexistence, and they seem to hang around the pen, taking dust baths outside the gate. The cat has extended her policy of ignoring the chickens to all poultry. We’re busy making sure our turkeys have a congenial environment, conducive to intellectual achievement.

They're scarier than they seem

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All the chickens seem normal and healthy.  They’re eating, and pecking, and dust bathing.  Nobody’s obviously at death’s door. 

But this clearly came out of a chicken, and we don’t have the foggiest idea what it is.  Do you?

The mystery in the nest box

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They named the 20%, which were, of course, chosen at random. At the end of the year, though, the spurters showed significantly more improvement than their peers. Their teachers’ expectation of better performance seemed to result in actual better performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson called this phenomenon “the Pygmalion effect,” and published their results in their 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom.

Well, if it works for third-graders, I figure it’ll work for tomatoes.

Kevin decided that, rather than using tomato cages, which are difficult to get into rocky soil and insufficient to the support requirements of large tomato plants, this year he would build a trellis for our 24 plants. Our friend Ed has a big bamboo patch in his back yard, and he generously donated a landscape trailer full for the trellising effort.

One day last week I was out running errands, and Kevin was putting the finishing touches on a tomato trellis a good ten feet high. Ten feet!

Kevin's tomato trellis

“That’s a big trellis,” I said.

“Last year, our biggest plants were easily this tall,” said Kevin.

And it’s true. Last year, our biggest tomato plants were ten feet tall. I think that’s why we got a decent tomato crop despite getting the blight, which starts and the bottom of a plant and works its way up. It takes a while from blight to climb ten feet.

So, this year, we’re quite literally setting the bar high. I’m thinking that the tomatoes, seeing that bar, will understand what’s expected of them and strive for achievement. Pygmalion in the Garden.

You may think that’s far-fetched, but I don’t think it’s less reasonable than some other gardening theories out there. Take companion planting, for example. Can you seriously believe that your corn will grow better if it has a pet parsley? And then there’s this crazy biodynamic theory that says – I kid you not – you should determine when to plant, cultivate, and harvest by the phase of the moon.

You laugh (or at least I do), but Fiona at Cottage Smallholder, one of my favorite bloggers and a better gardener than I’ll ever be, has started using the system and swears by it. Go figure.

Gardening lends itself to crackpot theories because it’s profoundly mysterious. Every year, some things thrive and some things fail, and they’re never the same things, and it’s never for the same reasons. Humans are hard-wired to look for causality, but it’s hard to find in nature because there are simply too many variables.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution. A quadratic equation, say, or a crossword puzzle. Problems that involve nature aren’t like that.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution.

And it’s not just gardening. Look at fishing. Fish behavior is a function of water temperature, salinity, the presence of food, the tide, the weather, the fish’s birthplace, the sea bottom terrain, and, for all I know, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But, even if you know all those things, you can’t predict fish behavior with certainty because there are other factors that we don’t even know enough to consider. And that’s even if fish don’t have free will, or enjoy sightseeing.

Gardening, though, is even worse. Trying to figure out how to make a plant thrive is hopelessly complicated because everything from tiny insects to global warming seems to affect what grows and what doesn’t.

Sometimes, you can isolate a problem. Last year, like everyone else in New England, we got the late blight on our tomatoes. The slugs found the collards. The chickens dead-headed the fennel. I get that. But why did nothing grow in a whole strip on the left side? Why was the garlic so puny? And the potatoes – they didn’t even sprout.

The eggplant and squash, though, did well. And the basil we planted in every available space delivered all summer. Why, why, why?

It’s so hard to get at the truth of gardening that I understand why we grasp at causal straws like the phase of the moon. I’m almost ready to start praying to the ancient pagan god of gardening, assuming there is one.

Almost.

First, though, we’re trying soil amendments. We seemed to have a pattern of leggy plants with a sub-optimal foliage-to-fruit ratio, which, I’m given to understand, is a symptom of too much nitrogen. So we tilled in phosphate and greensand to beef up the P and the K of the N-P-K. We got three yards of compost from Watts Family Farm, which is said to have the most nutrient-rich compost on Cape Cod.

This year, the sugar snap peas I lovingly started from seed in the cold frame looked like jute twine with a couple of yellowish leaves glued on until they died altogether. The eggplant, usually insect-free, has depressingly lacy leaves. The fennel and beet seeds, which I planted directly in the garden, have produced anaemic little seedlings that hold little promise.

Is it the N? The P? The K? The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Damned if I know.

They know what's expected of them

One bright spot, though, is the potatoes. Kevin planted two kinds – Kennebec that we ordered from a fancy-pants organic catalog, and fingerlings we bought from Costco and left too long in the bin. Both kinds seem to be thriving and the Kennebec, in particular, have sent up big thick stems that Kevin mounded soil and mulch around.

The leaves are, so far, almost free of insect damage. The flowers are just beginning to bloom. We don’t know what the crop looks like, of course, and it could be that we have all leaf and no tuber, but it’s reassuring just to see the nice big patch of healthy green.

Is it the weather? The sunlight? The compost? The companion garlic?

My theory is that it’s my husband, who’s full-blooded Irish. Centuries of subsistence farming have encoded an indigenous understanding of the variables of potato growing into the Irish genome, and so it’s quite reasonable for him to expect much of them.

So, what explains last year’s crop failure, you may ask.

Damned if I know.

But if you need help with the crossword puzzle, I’m your man.

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I couldn’t tell you a single activity, my age at the time, or even where the camp was. All I remember was that I was excited when I learned there was spaghetti for lunch – until I tasted it. It was vile. Mushy, bland, and disgusting. It bore no resemblance to the spaghetti I had at home, spaghetti with my mother’s tomato sauce.

I didn’t eat it. And for me to not eat something, even then, was a big deal. I ate everything.

Turkeys, one month old

It’s embarrassing that the only thing I remember from day camp is the food. Day camp plays an important role in socializing a child, and I should remember seminal childhood experiences like being picked last for teams, being made fun of, being ostracized by my peers. I’m sure all those things happened, and I think it says something about my psyche that what sticks in my mind is the Chef Boy-R-Dee.

I’m now having a second experience with day camp, and it’s also about food.

In the two-and-a-half weeks we’ve had them, our turkey chicks have gotten big enough that they seem a little cramped in their brooder. The pen we have planned isn’t yet set up, so Kevin decided he’d set up Turkey Day Camp in the upper garden.

The upper garden is a patch about ten feet square. Half of it is filled with potato plants, and the other half has the sad remains of our failed overwinter garlic. There’s a lone rhubarb plant and a clutch of catalognas across the back. Most importantly, though, there’s a chicken-wire fence.

Although the fence is only eighteen inches high, we thought it would be sufficient to keep four month-old turkey chicks confined. We were wrong. We had an escapee in the first hour. We solved that problem by putting a clam net – the commercial kind, used to cover clam beds on the sea floor – over the entire garden. Always useful to have a clam net lying around.

We put their food and water in a corner, and Kevin put a bedsheet over the section of net covering them so there’d be some shade.

Voila! Turkey Day Camp.

Camp Wattle

The turkeys seem to be enjoying themselves. They run around and peck at the bugs and the grass. They’ve started to practice being adults, fluffing out the their wings and raising their tails so they look like small scraggly imitations of picture-book turkeys. They chest-bump. In short, they spend the day being turkeys. At night, we put them back in their brooder in the garage, where they’re safe from predators.

A camp follower

The cat and the chickens have been around to investigate, but there haven’t been any fireworks yet. Since the cat and the chickens have gotten used to each other, they seem to be able to take a third species in stride.

What surprises us most about the turkeys is that they seem to enjoy human company. When they’re in the brooder in the garage, they often peep loudly and insistently, but settle down immediately when we come to visit.

At Day Camp, they tend to crowd against whichever wall is closest to where we’re working, running back and forth. We worry that they’re not eating and drinking enough, but when we go sit outside the corner with their food and water, they inevitably come over and partake.

Turkey Day Camp won’t see them through to Thanksgiving, but it’s buying us some time to get their adult pen set up. Meanwhile, they’re giving every indication of enjoying day camp a lot more than I ever did.

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We’re making a similar deal with our turkeys, only without the egg part. It would be the same with any other animal we raise for food. We provide food, shelter, and, we hope, some modicum of happiness. They take advantage of these amenities, and then ultimately give us back the life we gave them in the first place, sometimes providing eggs or milk along the way.

Big Bee, trying to stay cool

The animals, though, have no say in the matter. If they don’t like the deal, there’s not much they can do. It’s like one of those elections in totalitarian countries – we’re the only choice they have. They can’t really make a break for it, since they’re poorly equipped for life in the wild, and when the time comes for making the ultimate sacrifice, there’s no negotiating. There’s no appeal to a civil court system or board of arbitration. However good a deal it is, it’s a deal we enforce by fiat, despotically.

Totalitarian, indeed.

Bees, though, are different. They can survive perfectly well without our intervention. In fact, if it turns out that the captive breeding of bees (which has only happened in the last fifty-some years), has some role in colony collapse disorder, we will be able to say that they survived much better without us. There’s nothing we do for bees that they can’t do for themselves.

They can also take off, and head from greener pastures, any time they feel like it. Successful beekeeping is all about providing a more hospitable home than your bees could find in a hollow tree. They need to decide to stay.

It’s lucky, then, that they don’t know what those two little boxes on top of their hive are for.

A hive frame. The white cells on top are honey. The darker cells below are brood. The fuzzy spot is on the camera lens.

One of our hives, Big Bee, is doing so well that we added two honey supers a couple of days ago. (Little Bee seems to be fine, but it’s a bit behind.) We’d added the second hive body about a few weeks before, and when we checked it last week the frames were almost all drawn out with comb, and the center seven or eight were quite full with brood and capped honey.

That’s the point at which you’re supposed to give them a new area in which to store their honey, and the two shallow boxes on top of the hive serve that purpose. The bees naturally fill the upper combs with honey and the lower combs with brood, so we can expect that the two honey supers will have almost nothing but honey in them.

Better than a hollow tree, we hope

Many beekeepers use a queen excluder – a screen that workers fit through but the queen doesn’t – between the top hive body and the bottom super to make sure no eggs are laid upstairs. Our local veteran beekeepers work successfully without one, though, so that’s the route we’re going.

Because there aren’t many plants that bloom in July, it’s late for optimal honey flow. We’re not sure how long it’ll take the bees to fill out the supers, and we’re resisting the urge to check on them every few days.

Right now, I suspect the bees are thinking their accommodations are pretty luxurious. We’ve given them two completely empty boxes in which to store their honey – that’s like giving a packrat a shed. When we wait for them to fill those boxes and then take them away, though, I wouldn’t blame them for hightailing it to the nearest hollow tree.

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Our local feed store, Cape Cod Feed and Supply, employs the same strategy. Yesterday, we went in for chicken feed. We told Anita, the woman who sold us our chicks last year, and has been listening to our stories ever since, that we needed a fifty-pound bag of layer pellets. She rang it up, and told us we could pick it up on the dock.

Ten days down, 150 to go

And then we turned around, and there they were. The feed-store version of People. Cute, fuzzy, baby chicks.

There were two brooders of them. On the right were chickens, and on the left were turkeys.

Turkeys! Standard bronze, straight run. $14.99 each.

Kevin and I have talked about turkeys. We even thought about having them this spring, but we’ve adopted a rule that Kate of Living of the Frugal Life uses – one new species per year. This year, we got bees, as did Kate. Turkeys were to be considered next year, as were pigs, which we will probably consider every year from now until Doomsday.

But there they were, cute little mottled brown chicks a little over a week old. They looked very small and low-maintenance. Besides, I’d just read Kate’s post about how a friend of hers offered her a turkey poult which she, of course, accepted – thereby violating her own rule and leaving me without a leg to stand on.

I thought, when I read Kate’s account, that this was an excellent way to acquire livestock. No considering, no debate, no endless lists of reasons pro and con. Someone just shows up at your door with a bird, you take it, and you figure it out as you go along. People have been raising poultry for millennia; it’s not that hard.

We bought four.

Their new home

We dragged the brooder we’d used for the chickens out from behind the garage and washed out a spare waterer. We had half a bag of pine shavings leftover from when we changed the litter in the chicken coop, and an old cast-iron pot we could use as a feeder. We had our turkey set-up set up in the garage in about ten minutes.

They’ll probably outgrow the brooder in about three or four weeks, which means we have three or four weeks to figure out what to do next. At the moment, we have no idea, but we’ve solved much harder problems in much less time.

The chicks have gotten the lay of the land in their new brooder, and all four are eating and drinking. One managed to escape through a hole in the chicken wire which we had misjudged to be smaller than a 10-day old turkey, but we caught him and closed up the hole. The chickens wandered into the garage and cocked their heads at the sounds of baby-chick peeps, but didn’t seem to notice the big cage with the turkeys in it.

So far, so good, but I have a feeling it’s just a matter of time before this turns out to be a mistake. If there were an award for Worst Impulse Buy Ever, livestock would definitely be in the running, and I’m not at all sure we can expect to get away with this.

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When your house is just barely good enough to let your friends inside it, you don’t aspire to Architectural Digest.

It's ready for its close-up

But I am here to report that my husband has scored a design coup of Architectural Digest proportions. His chicken coop is featured on BobVila.com! In the hayseed set, that’s as good as it gets.

Those of you who were following this space last year got the blow-by-blow of coop design and construction. Those of you who weren’t can see a recap here.

If you have a minute, take a look at Bob Vila’s gallery of chicken coops – we’re number ten out of eleven. The text gives me more credit than I deserve; Kevin did most of both the design and construction. I butted in here and there, went with him to the lumberyard, and did the part of the roof that has two huge bumps where the shingles aren’t staggered properly.

The chickens, luckily, don’t seem to mind.

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I had high hopes, going in. After last year, which was so wet and cold that nothing grew until well into July, I saw our warm May and weeks of sun as harbingers of lush tomatoes and big, firm cucumbers, succulent eggplants and full, ferny fennel.

Hah!

I am being thwarted by bugs and weeds, and I’m convinced they’re in it together. “Gardening” is just a hoax.

Decapitated cucumber seedlings

Here’s how it works. Humans are lulled into the idea that they can grow things by the fact that things are just growing, of their own accord, all around us. If trees, and grass, and flowers, and even edibles like wild grapes and beach plums manage to grow themselves, just imagine what we humans, with our free will and opposable thumbs, can grow, if we put in a little effort!

So, what do we do? The first step is to till a nice patch of soil, and amend it with compost and fertilizers to make it as plant-friendly as possible. This is the part where the weeds rub their little roots together and say, “Heh heh, we got ‘em now! Just look at that nice patch of ground – it’s way better than what we have now!” And they promptly move in.

But not before they make a deal with the bugs. “Hey, bugs,” they say. “If you leave us alone, we’ll leave just enough room in the garden for some nice young kale, and a few tender beet greens.” The bugs know a good deal when they see one. They’re extremely fond of kale.

This is why, a mere three weeks or so into the gardening season, the garden is a bed of absolutely unblemished weed seedlings interspersed with devastated cucumber sprouts, beet shoots, and fennel frondlets. I can barely tell the beets from the weeds – I have to look closely for the purple stems – but the bugs seem to be able to find them with both antennae tied behind their backs.

I can’t blame all our problems on bugs and weeds, though. Some of them stem from sheer ineptitude. Our problems with the sugar snap peas, for example, seem to be our fault.

I started them back at the very end of February, and transplanted them to the garden some time in April. They were a little weedy-looking, with long skinny stems and sparse leaves, when I transplanted them, but I figured they’d thrive once they were no longer pot-bound.

No such luck. They got longer and weedier. Too much nitrogen? Could be. We tried to amend the soil with greensand (for potassium) and phosphorus, but then the leaves started to turn yellow, from the bottom up.

Almost ready for toe shoes

I had a moment of hope when I visited our friends Al and Christl. I’ve talked about them here before; they’re the best gardeners we know. Their house is surrounded by healthy, vibrant, growing things. They have a beautiful asparagus patch, a big raised bed of strawberries, a forest of raspberries, and a well-ordered vegetable plot. Somehow, they’ve managed to outwit the bug-weed cabal. Personally, I think Christl made a deal with the devil.

My moment of hope came when Christl told me her sugar snap peas were also suffering. “They just won’t grow,” she said. “I only have one flower.” So I guess it’s just a bad year for them, I thought. If Christl’s having trouble, I certainly can’t expect to succeed. There’s hope for me yet!

And then she showed me her plants, and the hope died within me. They were full and green and thick-stemmed. Okay, so there was only one flower, but the plants themselves looked like they could produce them any time they wanted, and were just holding them in reserve. Compared to mine, her sugar snaps were a veritable jungle.

Blight?

It’s not just our sugar snaps that are tall and skinny – our garlic, kale, and collards have met the same fate. They’re also, I suspect, victims of nitrogen. The kale, particularly, is downright willowy, like a Bolshoi ballerina. Good kale should be short and squat, more like an East German gymnast.

The tomatoes haven’t had time yet to get leggy, since we just put them in last week, but I’m sure they will. Unless, of course, the blight gets them first. I’ve seen a couple of spotty leaves that make me very uneasy.

The one bright spot is Kevin’s potatoes. They’re bushy and green, and seem to grow several inches a day. We have two rows of Kennebec, which we bought as seed potatoes, and one row of fingerlings, which we bought to eat but languished, forgotten, at the back of the potato bin until they sprouted.

The potato crop

There’s only minimal insect damage, from what we suspect are thrips, but I think it’s only becaue the potato beetles strong-armed the rest of the insects to stay off the potatoes until they’re big and tasty, so they can move in and devastate the crop at the very last minute. Once they’ve eaten their fill, I’m sure they’ll band together and lift the fence so the rabbits can come in and finish everything off.

If the devil’s still available, I’m ready to deal.

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When our hens first started producing (September 22, 2009, that would be), we thought it was utterly miraculous. You’d think that two people who’d known all their lives that eggs come from chickens could take it in stride when their chickens laid eggs, but we didn’t. We carefully preserved the shell of the first egg, having blown out and scrambled the contents (one bite each). We marveled at how the eggs got bigger, commensurate with the chickens, as the months wore on. Every day, it was our little bit of excitement to check the nest boxes and tally the take.

You have to draw the line somewhere

And we ate more eggs. We scrambled them and poached them and fried them. We made omelets and frittatas. I even baked, an activity dangerous to the waistline of someone who can’t resist baked goods.

I had taken it as an article of faith – most of us do – that back-yard eggs from overindulged chickens taste better than the supermarket eggs that are the product of factory farms. But, while I certainly enjoyed our eggs, I couldn’t say for sure that they tasted any different from other kinds.

There was only one way to find out.

Last fall, we hosted an egg tasting. We invited six of our closest friend, several of whom are food professionals. We made them put on blindfolds and we spoon-fed them (and they, us) soft-boiled samples of our eggs, regular supermarket eggs, supermarket organic eggs, and fancy-pants Country Hen organic eggs.

It was not a dignified event, and at least two shirtfronts will never be the same.

The upshot? No one can tell the difference. The tasters’ comments were all over the map – each kind of egg got both good and bad assessments – and the best-in-show vote was split almost evenly among all four.

It made for a good story, and it was on the front page of the food section of yesterday’s Washington Post. From there, it got picked up by Slate and The New York Times.

The comments came pouring in, and the vast majority made one of two points:

1. Tamar, you’re a jackass because the reason you eat eggs from well-treated hens isn’t for the taste, it’s because you want hens to be treated well.

2. Tamar, you’re a jackass because I and all my friends – in fact, everybody in the world except you and your friends – can tell the difference between a backyard egg and a storebought egg.

That first one’s easy. I agree completely. In fact, I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to that effect a couple years back. I also made that point in the egg tasting story, but apparently not everybody reads to the end.

That second one is more complicated.

Those of us who keep chickens, and those of us who get eggs from people who keep chickens, know that fresh, backyard eggs certainly look different. They generally have brighter yolks (because the chickens eat greens and bugs, and not just feed), and the yolks and whites hold together better and are harder to beat (because the egg is fresher and hasn’t lost carbon dioxide through its shell).

It would stand to reason that eggs with manifest visual and textural differences would also taste different, but all evidence is that it just isn’t so.

There was our tasting, in which we found that all eggs taste pretty eggy. There was the poultry scientist I interviewed for the article, who confirmed that, if tasters can’t see a difference in the eggs (the industry does tests using lights that mask colors), they don’t taste a difference either. There was also a commenter on the New York Times site who said that they did similar tests in France, with the same result.

That's Kevin spoon-feeding Rick, who's flanked by David and Mary Ann. (Thanks to Doug Langeland for the photo.)

Despite the consistent results in all blind tastings (that I know of), people just don’t want to believe that eggs from the pampered hens in their backyards taste the same as the eggs from the mistreated birds in factory farms. (If you are one of those people, I urge you to try a blind tasting yourself. I think you’ll be surprised.)

I understand why people hold on to that belief. Everyone at my tasting, including Kevin and me, wanted to hold on to that belief. The idea of backyard, free-range eggs is so much more palatable that it’s natural to think that the eggs themselves must also be more palatable.

If people believe their home-grown eggs taste better, even if that’s not true, why disabuse them of the notion? Don’t we just deny them that pleasure, to no real purpose?

There is a real purpose. Many of us who believe livestock should have a decent life are trying to convince American consumers that it’s worth it to spend a little more for eggs, milk, and meat from well-treated animals. One of the arguments, often, is that those products taste better.

If those products don’t taste better, the American consumer who ponies up the extra bucks only to find that the expensive stuff tastes just like the cheap stuff is going to feel, quite rightly, that he’s been sold a bill of goods. It’ll make it very easy for him to tell himself that people advocating sustainable, animal-friendly farms are drinking their own Kool-Aid and needn’t be listened to.

If we’re going to convince people to buy products from farmers and growers who look out for the well-being of their livestock, we have to sell the products on their genuine merits.

In short, if free-range farmyard eggs don’t taste better, it doesn’t do those of us who oppose factory farms any good to go around saying they do. What’s important about eggs has little to do with the eggs themselves, and everything to do with the chickens that lay them. So let’s just say that.

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When you first install a package of bees, the colony is very vulnerable. You begin with ten or twelve thousand bees with a queen in a cage. The queen has already been mated, and is ready to lay eggs. It takes a few days for the bees to release the queen from the cage (by eating through the candy that blocks the entrance), and then it takes a few more for the queen to begin laying.

Headed out to forage

From there, it’s twenty-one days before the first new bees emerge. That means there’s a good month when bees are dying but not being born, and the population of the hive steadily decreases. Since there’s a great deal of work to be done – comb to be drawn, pollen and nectar to be gathered, brood cells to be capped – it’s a bad time to have dwindling numbers.

Kevin and I worry. We worry that the bees won’t like their hives, or that they won’t take to their queen, or that they won’t find sufficient food, or that they’ll simply fly away.

We also wonder. We wonder whether the queen has been released from her cage, whether the hive is coming together as a colony, whether there’s sufficient comb for eggs, pollen, and nectar.

We’re planning to open the hive for the first time tomorrow, to see if the queen is out. We’ll lift out at least one frame (to remove the queen cage), and we’ll get some idea whether everything’s going smoothly. In the meantime, we find ourselves spending a great deal of time standing by the hives, watching.

Headed in with pollen

We’re reassured by activity, and try to make sense of just what the bees are doing. They fly up, and then out to forage. They seem to be evicting the drones (the male bees, who don’t do any of the hive’s work and whose upkeep is a drain on the colony). We were delighted to see that they’re coming back to the hive loaded up with pollen.

We’re determined not to make the amateur’s mistake of going into the hive too often, but we see how it happens. You want to know. You want to watch. You want to see how a colony forms, check the brood pattern on the frame, gauge how much honey they’re making.

We think a lot of our experiments have been interesting. Chickens are interesting. Mushrooms are interesting. Lobsters are interesting. Even tomato plants are interesting Bees, though, bees are fascinating.

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