Curing Allergies With Free Range Eggs

This is the view out of my dining room window right now, and as you can see it's full of trees. I live in one of the worst cities in the U.S. for allergy sufferers. The things that make this city so beautiful (lots and lots of trees and gardens) also make it a pollen factory in the spring. As allergy sufferers go, I count myself pretty lucky, I've only really been affected by a bad allergy to maple pollen, which means that for about four weeks in the spring, my nose and eyes go haywire. 

But, as you can tell, right outside my window is an enormous maple tree, just hanging with pollen bombs releasing this cargo into the wind. One step out the door and my eyes start itching immediately. But since it shades our chickens and provides home for our resident squirrel village, I would never think about cutting it down. I've just endured through maple pollen season.

Until now.

Three years ago, I noticed that my chickens ate the pollen bombs that dropped into their pen like candy. A lightbulb went off in my head. I remember drinking these nasty little vials of very dilute poison oak extract as a kid, in hopes that my awful poison oak allergy would diminish, and I know friends who get allergy shots with the same purpose. What if I inoculated myself against maple pollen by feeding it to my chickens?

Thus started a three year project of Operation Pollen Eggs where every morning when I let the chickens out, I pick as many pollen bombs as I can carry off of the trees and throw them in the pen. The chickens eat them like crazy, I eat the eggs. That's it.

The first year, I didn't notice much difference. Every foray outside left me miserable. But I started it late in the season.

The second year, I started earlier, as soon as I saw the pollen starting to bloom. I noticed something funny. By about mid-pollen season, I wasn't nearly as affected as in previous years though it was still noticeable.

And this year? No pollen allergy at all. None. I can romp around under the maples with abandon. An eight mile run through the forest and not so much as an itchy eye. And this is from a woman who used to want to claw her eyes out after a foray outdoors in May. I owe it all to my free-ranging, egg-laying, pollen-bomb-eating chickie ladies.

The benefits of eating good, clean, local, real food never cease to amaze me.

Chickening Out

If you ask my kids what the best day of the year is, I'm not sure they'd say Christmas or their birthday. They might just say it's baby chick day. Every two to three years, we get to go and pick out some new baby chicks to add to our flock of egg layers. A few weeks before, the kids get the Chick Calendar that tells which breeds are coming in on which day. Since our flock is small, we only get a few chicks at a time, which means we need to get them all on the same day. If you got two chicks one week and two the next week, the second batch would get picked on relentlessly for being smaller. Henpecked is not just a phrase, it's a reality of chicken life, and I can tell you it's more than a little painful. Those beaks are sharp.

So the kids go back and forth on which day we should get our chicks. Should we go for the day they have Americaunas, Barred Rocks, and Speckled Sussex? Or the day they have White Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, and Andalusians? Should we reserve our chicks? Or just go pick them out? So many decisions. I get the baby chick cage, feeder, and heat lamp out of the shed and dust them off, and away we go to baby chicken land.

This year, Mackenzie got two Barred Rocks (the little black puffballs). They're his favorite kind of chicken - they're good layers, have sweet personalities and are pretty. So now Cluck Norris and Chess A. Beak (or Chessie for short) will join Voodoo and Hera as our resident Barred Rocks.

Asa got an Americauna (they lay the green eggs that are so pretty), and a Golden Sex Link (so named because the sex of the chicks are linked to their color as babies, so you can't accidentally get a rooster, which is important for us city dwellers where roosters are banned). So Mercedes joins Lady Cluck as our Americaunas, and Sunny will be our lone Golden this year.

Of course, in my mind, the primary purpose of all of this are those absolutely delicious golden-orange yoked beautiful bits of eggy heaven that I get to scramble and bake with all year long. There is nothing in this world like a free-ranging farm-fresh egg for taste or nutrition. This photo to the left shows a store-bought "free range" chicken egg (top, paler and runnier), and one of our insect, worm, and grass-fed beauties on the bottom. And I love that I can throw raw eggs in smoothies and never worry about contamination.

Of course, around here the chickens are never just for egg production. They're well-loved members of the family!