eggs | The Spicy Cauldron

Meet the Jubilee Orpingtons

Jagger is one of our two Jubilee Orpington hens, and is around 26 weeks old. All Orpingtons are notoriously slow to reach maturity, so it’s likely we won’t be getting any eggs from Jagger or her sister, Whitney, until early next year. Perhaps by then they will have grown the wattles (below the beak) and comb (on top of the head) common to most but not all breeds of chicken, and will look less like birds of prey.

In the photo above you can just about make out the beginnings of these features. There’s a distinctly falcon-ish appearance to their heads right now, and unlike the Buff Orpingtons, or any of our other hens, the Jubilees have really hard, thick and big skulls. Jagger is so named because she’s so far displayed a rock star attitude by squawking loudly, occasionally trashing the inside of the hen-house and, when she first arrived, she tried to total our kitchen.

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Friday, October 3rd, 2008

tags: buff orpingtons, eggs, hens, hierarchies, Jubilee Orpingtons, livestock, pecking order, pets, point of lay, poultry

Never mind the BBC, vegetarians can get vitamin B12 from eggs

When I read this report on the BBC website about vitamin B12 preventing memory loss, I was horrified to read as a vegetarian that B12 is found in meat, fish and milk. Further down the article, fortified cereals get a brief mention, but alongside liver and shellfish. From my point of view, ugh to all of these.

Keen to stop my brain from shrinking and prevent me ever forgetting my own name, I searched for where vegetarians can get B12, thinking I probably don’t get enough of this vitamin as I only consume a little milk, usually in my coffee and occasionally on cereals. I was profoundly relieved to discover that you can also get B12 from eggs, which I eat a lot of owing to the fact that we have a lot of hens producing them conveniently for our household just a few steps away from our back door.

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Tuesday, September 9th, 2008