Frequently Asked Question Friday
The eggs that we sell at Westholme are not washed before they’re sold. They go straight from nest to carton. Why? Because I want your eggs to stay fresh as long as possible. When a hen lays an egg, she puts a protective coating on the egg as she lays it. This coating is called the “bloom”. An eggshell is porous and the bloom seals the shell pores to prevent bacteria from getting inside the shell. It also reduces moisture loss from the egg. This means that the egg stays fresher for longer if you don’t wash the bloom off right away. Due to regulations, the eggs produced commercially at large operations (the eggs sold at the grocery store) need to be washed before they are able to be sold and that protection is lost. Being a small producer means that I have the luxury of providing eggs as nature intended for them to be, with the bloom intact.
Does this mean that the eggs you’ll get are dirty? Usually not. The eggs in the photo above were not washed before I took the picture. This is typically what our eggs look like. I work hard to keep the coops exceptionally clean, collect eggs often, and also to keep the chickens healthy. A healthy chicken in a clean coop means clean eggs straight from the nest most of the time. Because of this diligence, a lot of the time the eggs look like what you see in the photo – like they might have been washed even though they haven’t been. I’m not going to pretend that the eggs are always perfectly spotless, though, because they aren’t.
Chickens aren’t good at wiping their feet before they get into the nest box so, when it’s muddy (which seems like half the year, honestly), there are times where a chicken will come in to lay her egg with muddy feet and step all over eggs that were already in the nest. I try to position the nest boxes as far from their door as possible to facilitate the mud being wiped off naturally on their way over to lay an egg and, it helps, but it’s not foolproof. If an egg just has a muddy footprint on it, it gets brushed off and it goes into the cartons with the rest of the eggs. If it is exceptionally dirty from muddy footprints, it goes in the “reject basket” and we save it for our family to eat instead.
The same thing happens with poop sometimes when the girls get up while it’s still dark to lay their eggs. I don’t go out to clean the coops until sunrise so, if she’s up super early, a hen might step on a fresh poop and then step on other eggs in the nest when she goes to lay hers. Sometimes someone will poop in the nest also and then eggs are laid on top of the poop. This is pretty rare but it does happen. Any poop covered eggs also go into the reject basket and we wash and eat them instead of selling them to our customers.
In case you were wondering what those “reject” eggs look like, this is a photo of the eggs that didn’t make it into customer egg cartons over the past week.
The four at the top are perfectly clean but too large to fit in the carton and still be able to close it. The one on the plate at the top (12 o’clock) spot was just the opposite. It was too small to include. The one with the writing on it in the top left was laid in the corner of a coop instead of in a nest box and I didn’t see it. It may have been out long enough to freeze. If those four jumbo+ sized double yolker eggs at the top were a little bit smaller or the small sized one a little larger, they definitely would have been saleable. In terms of cleanliness, they look like the eggs you’ll usually get.
The three on the bottom right are the ones that were too dirty. The white one is just covered in muddy footprints, albeit a lot of muddy footprints! The brown one has a small poopy footprint on it. The green one also has poop but not a footprint. That day someone pooped in a nest box and Layla laid her egg on top of the poop. We don’t get many that are rejected because they’re too dirty (just 3 out of 150 this past week) but this is what they look like when they are.
These “reject” eggs are perfectly fine (except maybe the one that might have froze, one of the animals will get that one) and will be among the ones our family will eat next week.
These eggs below are the ones I’ve collected so far this morning. They’ve come straight from the nest boxes looking like you see here. This is typically what you will get.
Hopefully that helps clarify things a little for those of you who have wondered what an unwashed egg looks like. I think a lot of folks expect unwashed to equal exceptionally dirty. It can vary from farm to farm due to there being different conditions at each farm but this is what unwashed looks like at Westholme. If you have any other questions, please ask!
At the end of the day, my goal is to provide you, my customer, with the cleanest and freshest unwashed eggs possible. Sometimes there might be a little mud residue but I work hard to make sure that conditions are ideal for clean eggs as often as humanly possible.
Now, if I could just train the hens to wipe their feet on little mats before they go into the nest boxes….
