South Uist looks incredibly beautiful! And I love this idea of finding egg boxes from far, far away! Do they typically come in half dozens? Our egg cartons are usually by the dozen, and while some locals do sell eggs, I can’t say I’ve ever seen unattended eggs with an “honor system” for purchasing. Probably because we’re less honorable here?🤷🏻♀️
Only one word I had to look up this week--“smallholding.” I love that you spent time in the henhouse! Mine was the doghouse--well, wherever the dogs happened to hang out. My dad built them a grand doghouse which they refused to enter, staying under the house instead. Sometimes I would crawl under there with them--especially the one time there were lots of puppies under there.
Thanks, Holly! Yes, eggs are generally packed in half-dozen boxes here, although in supermarkets you can get extra-long boxes of a dozen. These are harder to store, of course, especially if you like to keep them in the fridge. If your egg boxes over there hold a dozen, is that in 2 x 6 format, or 3 x 4?
I'm sure you're no less honourable across the pond than we are over here! 🤣 In rural areas and villages you'll quite often see that people are offering eggs, homegrown cut flowers, part of their autumn apple glut, or jars of honey or marmalade from an unattended table out on the verge outside their house. People will help themselves and leave the right money in a jar, or follow an instruction, perhaps, to 'pop it through the letterbox'.
When I was walking the South Downs Way last year I passed a cake stand covered with a glass cloche on a table outside somebody's front gate alongside the route. It contained a pile of homemade flapjacks. 'Well done for walking!' read the sign. 'Fuel with a flapjack for £1!'. I smiled for MILES after seeing that - although I didn't actually buy one.
I love that you hung out with the dogs! It's important, isn't it, to have that special place to decompress, especially one where there are creatures who really understand us?
We don't have 3 x 4 egg boxes over here, but I've always thought that if shops wanted to sell by the dozen, then that format of box would be way more robust than 2 x 6!
I've just Googled what a flapjack is in the USA - it looks like a kind of little pancake. Over here, what we call flapjacks are made from rolled oats mixed with melted butter, sugar and golden syrup, pressed into a baking tin, baked and cut into oblongs.
LOL! I remember one of my dad's favourite Christmas presents one year was a HUGE pile of used egg boxes with the labels peeled off, together with a rubber stamp with the legend:
*Name of their house* EGGS FROM HAPPY HENS
He had a great time stamping them all, and my parents would sometimes have the odd empty box coming back to them (and not always just for refills!). Sadly they've very recently lost their last couple of hens, but they're planning on getting some point-of-lay birds in the spring.
Wow, Tom - thanks for linking to your wonderful post - 'farm fresh butt nuggets'!!! 🤣 It's one of your posts that I haven't read, as it predated my discovery of Substack by a couple of months - but I'll certainly be catching up on some of your others, now!
I really enjoyed this piece, Rebecca. We've kept our ladies for decades, including a time when we live within the city limits and flocks were verboten. Today, we've got a dozen ladies. A great mix of Buff Orpingtons (identical, so all named "Ethyl"), a couple of Easter Eggers, and a couple of Olivers. Egg prodution has waned a bit, now that the days are shorter. But we do keep our friends and family in eggs during the summer. They are indeed humorous creatures, each with a distinct mode and attitude. I'll be posting a piece on our flock on Thanksgiving Day (US, November 24). Keep up with the hen reportage for us!
Oh wow, Mark - I'm already looking forward to your post for Thanksgiving! Nice to have a mix of breeds. We kept bantams for their very tiny eggs, and aracaunas for their blue ones, and marans for the deep speckled brown ones. And all sorts of others as well - including plenty of Heinz 57s!
Speaking of Easter eggs, Easter Sunday was our favourite day of the year to collect eggs - our girls would have always laid a Cadbury's creme egg for us both. My brother and I would go down to the hen house with our baskets as usual, and lo: there would be a creme egg in each of the two nest boxes, alongside the normal variety. Clever, clever girls!
The deranged chicken sign is wonderful! Fresh eggs are amazing and I dream of having chickens someday, but we have so many foxes and coyotes here that I have to do some real planning beforehand. One of the things I love about living where I do is that my neighbors often have those honor boxes at the ends of their driveways with eggs, apples, whatever should someone want to buy them...
Thanks, Jacquie - it really made me laugh when I saw it! We would have trouble with foxes - now and again we'd lose a hen, a goose or a duck - and they'd even try to get to the lambs. No coyotes round here, thankfully. I love it when people sell their surplus goodies at their gate. I eat a lot - a LOT - of eggs, and my anxiety about running out of them is assuaged by the fact that I know that someone somewhere around here will have a box or two of eggs for me to buy from outside their house!
Nice story! As usual the scenery seems to have a calming effect. Your use of the words describing your visitor made me imagine it like I was really there. I laughed once you said the pickup was barrelling toward you. 🤣
There is no way the "honor system" would work around here. We have too many people. I think it would probably only work in rural areas.
LOL - Terry was pretty out there with his driving, Matt, absolutely! I think you're right about it being a more rural than city thing - I don't think I've ever seen produce for sale in this way in town.
There’s nothing like a batch of farm fresh eggs. One of the things I enjoy when we visit the local farmer’s market during our summer visits to the mountains. 🥚🥚🥚
Farm eggs are so much nicer, aren't they? Another thing, too - eggs are getting very expensive in the shops at the moment, but doorstep eggs are still pretty affordable, so that's an added bonus!
Lovely post, and nice photos. I especially like the 'deranged' sign -- I take a lot of pics of funny signs myself. We now buy our eggs from a veggie box place, not least because in supermarkets you have to check that the eggs in a box labelled large really are large -- because some people swap in order to save money. Anyway, I highly recommend this advert from 1957: https://youtu.be/bGr5y2tNoqM
Beautiful writing, Rebecca. Very descriptive, nicely organized. I felt as if I were riding along with you in Uist. Your photo of the machair was the finest I have ever seen and I have to say it tweaked my heart a bit. I have traveled in Scotland many many times and sorely miss it. Then I felt the urge to go scramble some eggs for my breakfast and that is what I did. Thanks for the journey.
You’re so kind, Sharron - thank you! Glad you were egg-spired at breakfast time!
We were in the Outer Hebrides for only a day and a half, sadly, to shoot some stuff for Jim’s book. We can’t wait to go back! We’d both ‘done’ some west coast isles before, but never together, so it was a lovely place to share and create memories, although it was such a fleeting visit.
Great post! I’m not an egg fan myself (the whole quivering-reproductive-cell thing did me in about the time I turned 13 (yes, I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation)) but I use them, cook them, fry them, etc for the family - and find it amazing that 2 x half dozens are cheaper than 1 dozen at my local supermarket (Waitrose)!
Thanks, Bryan! Gosh, I'm glad I've already had my breakfast - you may have put me off otherwise! 🤣 Only joking - but gosh, I can understand why you don't eat eggs, when you explain it in those terms.
Love this! My grandpa had an egg farm and reading your post brought back so many memories! Yes those egg boxes (we called them egg cartons) were like gold! :)
Go for it, Jillian! I'd love to keep hens again myself one day, but since I moved out of home - and ever since - my parents' girls would still always make me feel welcome whenever I went to hang out with them!
While we have local farm egg purveyors around here, I’ve not seen this kind of network. (Our road stands here usually flog kindling for fire or vegetables; the odd one I’ve seen had honey and pies.) Such a fun read, really enjoyed reading it!
Thanks, Bryn! The donkeys were sooooooo gorgeous. Great characters. Perhaps a little loud first thing the next morning, but that's countryside camping for you!
I loved the way you wrote this story about eggs! Procuring such fresh and very local eggs was one of the many delights I discovered when we moved to England from suburban California. In Devon we had eggs delivered weekly by a local egg 'farm', but like you said, if we forgot to ask for extras, we could just head into the surrounding fields and easily find some for sale. We have a local dairy with an unattended stand on the Island where we usually pick up our eggs now. And I loved the 'Deranged' sign.
Thanks, Sabrina! I've already replaced 'free range' with 'deranged' in my everyday lexicon!
Speaking of a dairy with an unattended stand, my brother lives close to a dairy farm with its own automatic vending machine selling farm milk, assorted cheeses, homemade rice pudding, salami, cream and eggs! It's absolutely amazing - I'd never seen anything like it. If you want milk you buy your first (empty) bottle from the vending machine (on subsequent visits you bring it back to refill) and pop it into the adjacent milk dispensing machine, where it is steamed for hygiene and then filled with chilled milk. I warned my brother I might just need to move to his village myself.... I need such a machine in my own life!
I love that!! It wounds a bit sci fi with the vending machine and auto sterilisation, but what a fabulous idea! The shed we get our eggs now has installed a refrigerator and a freezer, with milk and ice cream, but you do have to write everything down in a notebook with a pen, and then do the math and enter the total into the card machine. Its a lovely blend of old school write it down, and card convenience! Of course there is hand gel for sanitising too :)
We've had some family birthdays recently, and a parcel was handed over last weekend with the words: 'We came via the vending machine!'. There's still a lot of Dorset Blue Vinny in our fridge right now... 🤣
Oh my goodness-that is amazing! So sad not to have known that when we were driving a couple times a month from Plymouth to the Isle of Wight. We passed quite close to that shop! Mmmm: Blue Vinny, lucky you. There's a good pub by that name not too far from there too.
South Uist looks incredibly beautiful! And I love this idea of finding egg boxes from far, far away! Do they typically come in half dozens? Our egg cartons are usually by the dozen, and while some locals do sell eggs, I can’t say I’ve ever seen unattended eggs with an “honor system” for purchasing. Probably because we’re less honorable here?🤷🏻♀️
Only one word I had to look up this week--“smallholding.” I love that you spent time in the henhouse! Mine was the doghouse--well, wherever the dogs happened to hang out. My dad built them a grand doghouse which they refused to enter, staying under the house instead. Sometimes I would crawl under there with them--especially the one time there were lots of puppies under there.
Thanks, Holly! Yes, eggs are generally packed in half-dozen boxes here, although in supermarkets you can get extra-long boxes of a dozen. These are harder to store, of course, especially if you like to keep them in the fridge. If your egg boxes over there hold a dozen, is that in 2 x 6 format, or 3 x 4?
I'm sure you're no less honourable across the pond than we are over here! 🤣 In rural areas and villages you'll quite often see that people are offering eggs, homegrown cut flowers, part of their autumn apple glut, or jars of honey or marmalade from an unattended table out on the verge outside their house. People will help themselves and leave the right money in a jar, or follow an instruction, perhaps, to 'pop it through the letterbox'.
When I was walking the South Downs Way last year I passed a cake stand covered with a glass cloche on a table outside somebody's front gate alongside the route. It contained a pile of homemade flapjacks. 'Well done for walking!' read the sign. 'Fuel with a flapjack for £1!'. I smiled for MILES after seeing that - although I didn't actually buy one.
I love that you hung out with the dogs! It's important, isn't it, to have that special place to decompress, especially one where there are creatures who really understand us?
Our dozens are the 2 x 6 format--do you have a 3 x 4 over there?? That sounds like a very cute box for eggs!
I have never run across a flapjack in the wild, and now I will be smiling all day thinking about it!
We don't have 3 x 4 egg boxes over here, but I've always thought that if shops wanted to sell by the dozen, then that format of box would be way more robust than 2 x 6!
I've just Googled what a flapjack is in the USA - it looks like a kind of little pancake. Over here, what we call flapjacks are made from rolled oats mixed with melted butter, sugar and golden syrup, pressed into a baking tin, baked and cut into oblongs.
And I’ve just Googled what a flapjack is in the UK! An oat bar seems a much more sensible treat to leave someone than a pancake! 🤣
Yes! I'm not sure a pancake would keep anyone going for very long!
As a chicken-keeper, trust me, egg boxes are ALWAYS welcome and received with delight – when you gift eggs to people, you never get the boxes back 😂
LOL! I remember one of my dad's favourite Christmas presents one year was a HUGE pile of used egg boxes with the labels peeled off, together with a rubber stamp with the legend:
*Name of their house* EGGS FROM HAPPY HENS
He had a great time stamping them all, and my parents would sometimes have the odd empty box coming back to them (and not always just for refills!). Sadly they've very recently lost their last couple of hens, but they're planning on getting some point-of-lay birds in the spring.
That's adorable! I'm glad to hear they're planning on getting some more – aside from my cat, my chickens are one my favourite things in my life.
Fun stuff Rebecca, and fun to see that you’ve got the local egg trade going round you as well. Did you see my “Egg Car” piece a while ago? You’ll laugh at the similarities. https://open.substack.com/pub/tompendergast/p/the-egg-car?r=ofba&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Wow, Tom - thanks for linking to your wonderful post - 'farm fresh butt nuggets'!!! 🤣 It's one of your posts that I haven't read, as it predated my discovery of Substack by a couple of months - but I'll certainly be catching up on some of your others, now!
I really enjoyed this piece, Rebecca. We've kept our ladies for decades, including a time when we live within the city limits and flocks were verboten. Today, we've got a dozen ladies. A great mix of Buff Orpingtons (identical, so all named "Ethyl"), a couple of Easter Eggers, and a couple of Olivers. Egg prodution has waned a bit, now that the days are shorter. But we do keep our friends and family in eggs during the summer. They are indeed humorous creatures, each with a distinct mode and attitude. I'll be posting a piece on our flock on Thanksgiving Day (US, November 24). Keep up with the hen reportage for us!
Oh wow, Mark - I'm already looking forward to your post for Thanksgiving! Nice to have a mix of breeds. We kept bantams for their very tiny eggs, and aracaunas for their blue ones, and marans for the deep speckled brown ones. And all sorts of others as well - including plenty of Heinz 57s!
Speaking of Easter eggs, Easter Sunday was our favourite day of the year to collect eggs - our girls would have always laid a Cadbury's creme egg for us both. My brother and I would go down to the hen house with our baskets as usual, and lo: there would be a creme egg in each of the two nest boxes, alongside the normal variety. Clever, clever girls!
The deranged chicken sign is wonderful! Fresh eggs are amazing and I dream of having chickens someday, but we have so many foxes and coyotes here that I have to do some real planning beforehand. One of the things I love about living where I do is that my neighbors often have those honor boxes at the ends of their driveways with eggs, apples, whatever should someone want to buy them...
Thanks, Jacquie - it really made me laugh when I saw it! We would have trouble with foxes - now and again we'd lose a hen, a goose or a duck - and they'd even try to get to the lambs. No coyotes round here, thankfully. I love it when people sell their surplus goodies at their gate. I eat a lot - a LOT - of eggs, and my anxiety about running out of them is assuaged by the fact that I know that someone somewhere around here will have a box or two of eggs for me to buy from outside their house!
Nice story! As usual the scenery seems to have a calming effect. Your use of the words describing your visitor made me imagine it like I was really there. I laughed once you said the pickup was barrelling toward you. 🤣
There is no way the "honor system" would work around here. We have too many people. I think it would probably only work in rural areas.
LOL - Terry was pretty out there with his driving, Matt, absolutely! I think you're right about it being a more rural than city thing - I don't think I've ever seen produce for sale in this way in town.
There’s nothing like a batch of farm fresh eggs. One of the things I enjoy when we visit the local farmer’s market during our summer visits to the mountains. 🥚🥚🥚
Farm eggs are so much nicer, aren't they? Another thing, too - eggs are getting very expensive in the shops at the moment, but doorstep eggs are still pretty affordable, so that's an added bonus!
Oh Rebecca, I wish I could share your love of eggs. Great reading though!
Thanks, Mark! You're not an egg-lover, then? Thank you for not letting my obsessive egg-joyment get in the way of your reading my post!
Eggs do make for an eggs-cellent binding ingredient!
🤣
Lovely post, and nice photos. I especially like the 'deranged' sign -- I take a lot of pics of funny signs myself. We now buy our eggs from a veggie box place, not least because in supermarkets you have to check that the eggs in a box labelled large really are large -- because some people swap in order to save money. Anyway, I highly recommend this advert from 1957: https://youtu.be/bGr5y2tNoqM
Thanks, Terry - and that video's priceless! 🤣
Beautiful writing, Rebecca. Very descriptive, nicely organized. I felt as if I were riding along with you in Uist. Your photo of the machair was the finest I have ever seen and I have to say it tweaked my heart a bit. I have traveled in Scotland many many times and sorely miss it. Then I felt the urge to go scramble some eggs for my breakfast and that is what I did. Thanks for the journey.
You’re so kind, Sharron - thank you! Glad you were egg-spired at breakfast time!
We were in the Outer Hebrides for only a day and a half, sadly, to shoot some stuff for Jim’s book. We can’t wait to go back! We’d both ‘done’ some west coast isles before, but never together, so it was a lovely place to share and create memories, although it was such a fleeting visit.
Great post! I’m not an egg fan myself (the whole quivering-reproductive-cell thing did me in about the time I turned 13 (yes, I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation)) but I use them, cook them, fry them, etc for the family - and find it amazing that 2 x half dozens are cheaper than 1 dozen at my local supermarket (Waitrose)!
Thanks, Bryan! Gosh, I'm glad I've already had my breakfast - you may have put me off otherwise! 🤣 Only joking - but gosh, I can understand why you don't eat eggs, when you explain it in those terms.
It's so strange that prices can be so arbitrary!
Love this! My grandpa had an egg farm and reading your post brought back so many memories! Yes those egg boxes (we called them egg cartons) were like gold! :)
Thanks, Julie! Lovely to have the memories!
It sure is! Thank you.
I’ve always dreamed of having an egg farm. Your post makes me want one even more!
Go for it, Jillian! I'd love to keep hens again myself one day, but since I moved out of home - and ever since - my parents' girls would still always make me feel welcome whenever I went to hang out with them!
I will! Once I move out of my tiny Brooklyn apartment:)
While we have local farm egg purveyors around here, I’ve not seen this kind of network. (Our road stands here usually flog kindling for fire or vegetables; the odd one I’ve seen had honey and pies.) Such a fun read, really enjoyed reading it!
And those donkeys 😍
Thanks, Bryn! The donkeys were sooooooo gorgeous. Great characters. Perhaps a little loud first thing the next morning, but that's countryside camping for you!
I loved the way you wrote this story about eggs! Procuring such fresh and very local eggs was one of the many delights I discovered when we moved to England from suburban California. In Devon we had eggs delivered weekly by a local egg 'farm', but like you said, if we forgot to ask for extras, we could just head into the surrounding fields and easily find some for sale. We have a local dairy with an unattended stand on the Island where we usually pick up our eggs now. And I loved the 'Deranged' sign.
Thanks, Sabrina! I've already replaced 'free range' with 'deranged' in my everyday lexicon!
Speaking of a dairy with an unattended stand, my brother lives close to a dairy farm with its own automatic vending machine selling farm milk, assorted cheeses, homemade rice pudding, salami, cream and eggs! It's absolutely amazing - I'd never seen anything like it. If you want milk you buy your first (empty) bottle from the vending machine (on subsequent visits you bring it back to refill) and pop it into the adjacent milk dispensing machine, where it is steamed for hygiene and then filled with chilled milk. I warned my brother I might just need to move to his village myself.... I need such a machine in my own life!
I love that!! It wounds a bit sci fi with the vending machine and auto sterilisation, but what a fabulous idea! The shed we get our eggs now has installed a refrigerator and a freezer, with milk and ice cream, but you do have to write everything down in a notebook with a pen, and then do the math and enter the total into the card machine. Its a lovely blend of old school write it down, and card convenience! Of course there is hand gel for sanitising too :)
Wow, looks like your island dairy is pretty good with the tech if it's already up and running with a card machine!
I've just found the link to the farm near my brother - do have a look! https://www.dorsetblue.com/pop-up-shop
We've had some family birthdays recently, and a parcel was handed over last weekend with the words: 'We came via the vending machine!'. There's still a lot of Dorset Blue Vinny in our fridge right now... 🤣
Oh my goodness-that is amazing! So sad not to have known that when we were driving a couple times a month from Plymouth to the Isle of Wight. We passed quite close to that shop! Mmmm: Blue Vinny, lucky you. There's a good pub by that name not too far from there too.