Our homemade vinegar is brewing. Soon after returning with our "mothers," we moved them to bigger jars to start the feeding process.

We put each one in a mix of water and wine, then topped the jars with cheesecloth secured with rubber bands to keep out vinegar flies.

Note: If doing this at home, you might want to move the mother with a ladle, or wear gloves.

I used my bare hands and—even after scouring them with coffee, baking soda, and other supposed odor neutralizers—they smelled of vinegar for two days....

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Are you inspired to start your own flock? You're in luck: Many feed stores carry chicks in spring. (But, please, don't succumb to the lure of Easter chicks. Chickens need  coops, proper feed, and years of care. Don't impulse buy!)

The West is rife with events happening all over to orient new chicken owners. Here are just a few of the many classes and workshops we're looking forward to in 2008:

Portland

Livingscape Nursery holds their ChickenFest with workshops on coop-building and chicken care and selection, chicken-related film screenings, and displays of 20 different breeds March 26-28. (Details are still being finalized.)

Growing Gardens is holding an urban chicken-keeping workshop July 12.

Also sponsored by Growing Gardens: Portland's 5th annual Tour de Coops on Saturday, July 26. Tour urban chicken coops all over the city and chat with experienced chicken owners. In addition to all sorts of poultry-fabulous events, Growing Gardens also has good chicken resource information on their website, so click away!

Salt Lake City

Wasatch Community Gardens holds a class on Urban chickens on June 25. And on June 28, they'll have their own Tour de Coops (a bargain at only $5!)

San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco's Garden for the Environment has a class on city chickens (and ducks) March 29.  (Registration required; the cost is $15.)

Sunset's chicken guru Jody Main will be teaching a class on backyard chickens at Common Ground in Palo Alto on June 21. (Registration is required; the cost is $45.)

Seattle

Seattle Tilth hosts a class on raising baby chicks March 8, covering everything from chicken health and behavior to poultry law and coop construction. (Registration is required; the cost is $32).

Readers, do you know of others? Leave a comment, and we'll add 'em!

For our Bay Area readers: The guru of ethical, omnivorous eating, Berkeley's own Michael Pollan, will be speaking at Stanford University at 7:30 p.m. March 3. If you haven't read our interview with Pollan in the February issue of Sunset, check it out! And, you can read the full, unedited interview here.

Ruby says: Don't buy chicks impulsively. We're cute, but we're trouble.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We've been confident about our Chardonnay--both with and without oak chips--for a while now, and we'd been starting to joke about how fun and easy winemaking is (I can't say that I enjoyed high school bio and chemistry nearly this much). But if we'd had daydreams of entering and sweeping a home winemaker competition, our recent Syrah tasting knocked us down a few pegs.

As wine editor Sara Schneider mentioned in her Valentine's Day post, there was stunned silence from Team Wine when we sampled our first carboy of free-run Syrah. Finally, food editor Margo True offered, "It's like it's cinched with a belt."

Okay, so that carboy's Syrah was a little uptight, but the nose on the next one got us really worried, as did recipe editor Amy Machnak's comment after her first sip: "It's not awful, and it could have been."

And it just got worse from there, with our third carboy producing descriptions that seemed more akin to Chinese fast-food condiments: "sweet and sour" and "mustard." Eek!

We bought our Chardonnay as professionally pressed juice, but Team Wine picked and crushed the Syrah ourselves, a few of us even venturing into a (clean) trash can to stomp a few bushels of grapes. So I had to wonder, with tasty Chard and stinky Syrah, were my feet to blame?

It was clear that we needed professional help, and possibly some clinical analysis to diagnose whether our Syrah was "stuck" somewhere in its malolactic fermentation (MLF). Thankfully, Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella answered my plea for help. As you might recall, back in October he sold us his Chardonnay juice and let us into his vineyard to pick Syrah grapes. He's raised these grapes since they were just baby vines, and he knows their personalities, from when they're feisty young wines to when they grow up and can be trusted to drink. Who better to give us advice? (We just hoped he wouldn't be appalled at how his grapes were turning out in our hands.)

Zipping down from the hills in his vintage Fiat convertible, Michael arrived at Sunset HQ on a sunny but cool Saturday morning. We ushered him into our courtyard and showed the way to our dusty carboys, sitting in a shaded corner. We'd told Michael our theory about MLF being stuck, and he took note of the cool outdoor temperature: "Well, the ideal temperature for malolactic is 63°. It wants to be 60° to 65°. Any lower than that, and malolactic doesn't like it" and pretty much stops. We could have grabbed our thermometer to confirm our carboys' undoubtedly cool temperatures, but we had Michael's trained palate on hand, and the man was here for "a sip and spit."

He laughed as Sara pulled out our trusty turkey baster "wine thief," then related that Dr. Fogarty, a cardiologist as well as the founder of Fogarty Winery, "used to use a syringe, so this is better."

We started with the unoaked Chardonnay, and here's what Michael had to say:
"Hey, this is pretty good. Big acid, pretty creamy too--could be done." Then, after a second sip, "I'm pleased with that." (I think all of Team Wine silently cheered, Hooray!) "Malolactic often gives wine a little oily feeling, and this is a bit oily," he said, then suggested that we stir up our wine to clean things up. "Have you added any SO2?" (Sulfur dioxide is widely used to protect wine from bad bacteria and oxidation, but we haven't felt the need for it yet, plus it would stop MLF if it's not already done.) "I don't use any either. You can get by with less by leaving the lees [spent yeast] in there. You know what, this could be ready to bottle!" (This time, we did cheer out loud!)

On to one of our "oaked" Chardonnays--Michael, like most pro winemakers, oaks in a barrel, but we couldn't get our hands on one (they were a bit spendy for our little winemaking project), so our oaked Chardonnays just have a few handfuls of oak chips floating in them, likely not touching the wine in the bottom half of the carboys. Another good reason to stir our wines.

In Michael's words: "This doesn't seem as far along in malolactic." (Meaning the malic acid was still tingling our tongues and hadn't yet been converted into more mellow lactic acid--think of a lemon drop vs. a vanilla milkshake.) "I can't really detect the oak. And it's not as fat as the other one, so the malolactic isn't as far along. Its nose is more closed. And there's a tiny bit of stink on the nose, but that could be the toasty-burnt character of the oak chips." As a remedy, he again suggested stirring things up a bit: "Right now, I'm going through and stirring my Chardonnays two times a week."

Our Chardonnays have the same birthday, so we clearly need to get stirring soon. But how? Michael's first suggestion was a magnetic stirrer, but that kind of scientific equipment seems like a big (and somewhat clinical) investment. Switching into a home winemaker mindset, Michael suggested giving our wine the red carpet treatment: "Put a big strip of carpet on the floor, put a cork--a good, sturdy cork--in the carboy, duct tape it down, and start rolling it." (Ah, the fun of winemaking.)

With the Chardonnay tasted and passing inspection, it was time to move on to the Syrah. (Gulp.) We tried the free-run first, sampling from carboy 2--the smelly one. Michael concurred on the smell, and our hearts sunk.

But then a bit of unexpected news: "Stink is just a varietal character. And a young Syrah's character tends to have a lot of stink." (From P-U to Phew!) "Malolactic could be still in effect, but it smells pretty normal. Nice extraction. It tastes better than I thought it was going to taste." (Hey, is there an echo in here?)

Moving back to carboy 1 of the free-run Syrah, we were a little worried about Michael's take on its nose: "It seems a little gassy." And then the first sip: "It's a little spritzy." As we discussed "micro-oxidation" to open the wine up, Michael practiced a little micro-oxidation of his own, rapidly swirling his glass of Syrah as he advised that we "let the wine splash when racking" it into bottles to introduce oxygen. And by the time he was done swirling and sipped again, we got more good news: "It's excellent now. It's alive, and it's a young wine, but it's going to be excellent."

At this point, Team Wine was positively giddy--we could handle carboy rolling and introducing some oxygen to keep things on track.

But then we discovered one potential problem child: Unless we donate carboy 3 of free-run Syrah to Team Vinegar's "mother," we're going to have to clean up its "funkyness," as Michael termed it, politely saying, "I would be inclined to blend."

We might have halted primary fermentation too early, unleashing MLF before the yeasty-beasties gobbled up the sugar and got it down to 0° Brix.

Could Michael diagnose this by taste alone? He was pretty sure there was a bit of residual sugar left, but "I always do chemical analysis. Especially with malolactic. It's so hard to tell (when it's done), especially when it gets down low."

On the sugar front, Michael suggested a real home test: "What you should do is go to a pharmacy and get a blood-sugar diabetes kit: 0.1% is what you're looking for, but 0.2% is pretty good." But before we could fully digest this option, and because a drug store wouldn't have an over-the-counter test for malolactic, Michael offered to take samples back to Fogarty Winery's lab.

So we loaded him up with zip-locked plastic bags of wine (hey, we're home winemakers), which Michael safely stowed in his Fiat before zooming back into the hills. Any day now, we should get his scientific ruling and officially know which course to take.

Photographs by Ron Ehmsen (thanks, Dad!)

Answer me this: Is this not the cutest card ever?

Inspired by our photo of our beak-to-beak Rhodies, our crafty online editor Sheila Schmitz made this adorable pop-up card. (Find out how to make your own pop-up cards here.)

As far as our real, three-dimensional chickens, they are not crazy about the rain. Well, I'm not crazy about visiting them when it's raining. Even though they have a covered yard, the dampness of February rain gets into the straw under the coop and makes the whole area smell ... pungent. We're tossing straw into our compost bin as it gets soiled, but when the whole mess gets wet enough, there's no covering it up with fresh, clean straw. (A few hours of dry weather are enough to eliminate the smell entirely, though.)

The rain is terrific for the weeds, which continue to pop up all over the test garden at a tremendous pace. I pull them out — roots and all — and feed them to the girls, who gobble them up enthusiastically. We can't let our chickens free-range, but I like to think of my offerings of annual bluegrass and crabgrass as bringing the pasture to them. They snatch the tender blades first, often swallowing them in one, long, green ribbon, and then they use their feet to sort through the roots, nibbling on any earthworms, slugs or other critters unlucky enough to end up in their pen.

And despite the drizzly weather, they're settling into a thrilling 5-eggs-a-day pattern. The eggs have gotten notably fatter and darker too.

Our girl Honey is our last chicken to lay, which is not entirely surprising, considering how immature her comb and wattles are. She's squatting though, so it's just a matter of time.

Compare Honey (above) to Charlotte (below, right). They're the same breed — Buff Orpington — and the same age. But Charlotte looks like a fierce adult, while Honey still looks like an immature teen. (It may be my imagination, but Honey also seems to act like an immature teen. If I bring in a handful of greens and crouch down to feed them, Honey is always the one who waddles around behind me and takes a peck at my lower back. She's laughing at me, I swear. Maybe I'm getting too involved with these chickens.)

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

As far as chicken life goes, our flock has a sweet deal: A constant stream of chicken scraps, a swank 10- by 10-foot play area with a small pine tree, a coop with windows, people to pet them and feed them handfuls of grass. But recently I've been getting worried about them.

What if they get bored? What if they need more stimulation?

Perusing BackyardChickens.com, I got an idea. Cabbage, hung from the roof of the coop. That way, it could be a nutritious treat and a game of tetherball. Good for them and potentially hilarious! We couldn't lose.

First step: figuring out how to suspend a head of cabbage in mid-air. Our facilities supervisor, Tony Soria, didn't think it was at all odd when I showed up in the workshop asking if we could drill through a head of cabbage, but he helpfully pointed out that a drill would probably be overkill. Instead, he poked a hole through the core with a long, sharp skewer, and then threaded butcher twine through, tying a large washer onto the end to keep it secure.

Honey walks on by.

Sadly, all this effort was for naught. Maybe our chickens are spoiled by the tender greens they get from the garden, but they looked at our cabbage head — which was even organic! — like it was a boulder. Or invisible. Note Honey (above) walking by it like it didn't exist. It obviously did not register as food for them.

After a week of hanging, I had no choice but to declare the cabbage a failed experiment.

But the idea of chicken tetherball stuck with me.

So I replaced the cabbage with one of their favorite treats:

A peeled cantaloupe. This is what it looked like at 11 a.m. Friday.

Here's what it looked like at 3 p.m.

Ophelia was pecking at it like a piñata. It would slowly swing away from her, then come back, and she'd have another bite.

They continued to nibble on it over the weekend, but I got the impression that mobile food isn't really their thing. They prefer to step on their food and keep it still while they eat, so this morning, I cut the melon down. A few hours later, the only thing left was a little bit of skin.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Left: Our just-pressed oil, back in late November.

The day after we'd picked and pressed our olives, we had a quick tasting of the new oil (often called by its Italian name, olio nuovo). It was a deep, bright green and thick with tiny flecks of olive, and we loved it. It tasted intensely of the fruit itself, without the nasty bitterness you get from biting into a raw olive.

Associate travel editor Rachel Levin, bravely eating an olive straight off the tree. "Yuck!"

It's practically miraculous how pressing can quickly transform nasty fruit into delicious oil.

Our oil was fairly peppery, too. Slurping a small spoonful on its own induced slight coughing. (This is considered a good thing in the extra-virgin olive oil world.) But it was nothing compared with the intensely pungent olio nuovo from a few other artisanal California producers, like, for instance, Pietra Santa (where we'd pressed our fruit). Theirs is very delicious, and VERY pungent, in true Tuscan style. A three-cough olive oil.

Why was ours relatively mild, even though we'd used Tuscan olives in our oil? It's because the olives had been grown in a cool, misty climate, just outside Santa Cruz. Hot weather develops the spicy flavors in an olive, just as it does in chiles (if you've ever tried to grow them in cool weather, you'll find out that they end up tasting grassy, not hot).

Mild Olio Nuovo: a future big disappointment?

Even though it tasted wonderful as olio nuovo, did our oil have enough character to withstand months of settling? Would we open up a bottle after three months, only to find something that tasted more like canola oil?

Our fears were groundless. We've just tasted the oil, and even though its color has gone from vibrant green to golden, it still has plenty of flavor—smooth, buttery, and peppery on the finish. It'll be just right for cooking our One-Block Feast.

Our oil today.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Excuse me, ladies.

The nesting boxes are hopping. When I went to check for eggs on Friday, I accidentally found Carmelita (on the left) and Ruby doing their business. I snapped a photo, checked for eggs, and let them back to their privacy.

(When I lifted Ruby up, I found a one of Alana's blue eggs and her brown one. Carmelita laid a little later.)

As our weather becomes spring-like, warm and sunny, our egg production has picked up. Five of our girls are laying now — although our Buff Orpington Charlotte is having a bit of trouble starting up. Her eggshells look thin and chalky, and one of them broke on Thursday.

Speaking of broken eggs: We've had a few. We were worried at first that Carmelita (or maybe Ruby, jealous that her fellow Rhodie was laying?) was pecking eggs. This could potentially be serious — egg-eating chickens do exist. And once they've developed a taste for eggs, it's hard to break them of the habit. Some veteran chicken-wranglers swear that the only solution is the stew pot.

But after careful analysis, we think that Carmelita just started laying really thin-shelled eggs, which got knocked around in the box till they broke. After all, the eggs appeared to be pecked, but they were not eaten.

Our egg-production problems are slowly working themselves out as the ladies mature. We ate 10 eggs (slow-scrambled, with mushrooms and truffle oil) on Wednesday, and we still had all these on Friday.

When we first got our baby chicks, we were thrilled at the idea that we might get a couple dozen eggs a week, but it was hard to believe it would happen. Now, collecting a couple of eggs every time you check the nest box seems like no big deal.

Next: The games chickens play (and do not play)

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Egg update: Our chickens, acquired six months ago for the purpose of producing eggs for our One-Block Feast, have one by one begun to lay. Ophelia went first, with pale blue eggs. Alana, second, makes soft green ones. Carmelita followed, and hers are reddish brown.

And who turns out to be Layer #4, ahead of our stout, maternal-looking Buff Orpingtons, but Ruby—the chick who almost checked out. Witness her tiny, freckled effort below:

Ruby's egg at left, next to a storebought egg.

Weight: just under 1 ounce, versus 2 ounces for the storebought. Go Ruby! A milestone in the life of a little chicken.

The funny thing is: She's been our feistiest hen so far, croaking belligerently at us whenever we enter the coop, checking out the kitchen scraps first to let the others know they're edible (more croaking), bobbling along right on our heels as we leave (croak croak croak). But now, after creating this one egg, Ruby has mellowed. Not so bossy, much quieter...almost...contented. But then again, I could be reading way too much into this.

Anyway... as long as we're comparing eggs, here are all four of our layers' eggs next to that storebought behemoth:

Left to right: Ruby, Carmelita, Alana, and Ophelia. Center: Name unknown.

Next: Chicken tetherball! YEAH.

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The wine for our ultra-local feast is pressed off and sitting there all murky and brooding in its glass carboys. We’ve topped each with a “ferm lock”—a cool rubber-and-glass stopper that allows bubbles out (the wine’s last gasps from fermentation) but no air in. All the books say to stand by.

The yeast might take a little while to eat up the last dregs of sugar, and the malolactic bacteria might take even longer—weeks? months?—to transform the harsh malic acids into creamy lactic ones. Until the bugs eat their fill, the wine might taste strangely sweet and sour (scary, considering our investment in the grapes).

And it does—the Syrah, at least. Team Wine’s most recent monitoring mission—i.e., barrel tasting (make that carboy tasting) produced a few worries. A squirt of wine from our turkey baster (which turns out to work even better than a wine thief for extracting samples from carboys) into everyone’s glass wipes out any concern about color. It’s a rich, dense, blue-ish red. The cold-soak we gave the must before we started the fermentation clearly did its job, extracting serious color and flavor from the skins and seeds.

But when we taste it en masse, nobody says a word. There’s big fruit flavor in there all right, but with a funky, tangy edge. Is that the aforementioned okay funk? Or has some of the alcohol turned into acetic acid that the books also say can happen if the wrong bacteria have gotten into your wine—on little fruit-fly legs, say?

The Chardonnay, on the other hand, tastes wonderful. The version we didn’t put any oak chips in is crisp and full of green apple and pear flavors—“Asian pear skins,” says food editor Margo True, and we know she means that in a good way; “a cross between a Mason Sauvignon Blanc and a Talley Chardonnay,” says food writer Amy Machnak, and there’s no possible negative read on that.

The “oaked” version is a little softer, a little rounder. And both are amazingly clear; the lees have settled to the bottom. Exciting stuff.

The surprise to us across the board is that every carboy tastes different. The same wine in separate vessels is living a different life.

Time to call in the expert: Thomas Fogarty winemaker Michael Martella, who sold us the grapes and juice in the first place. He’s agreed to come taste with us this week to trouble shoot. Can this wine be saved?!

By Julie Chai, Sunset associate garden editor

To season our One-Block Diet dishes, we decided to make vinegar with some of Team Wine's syrah. I’d always thought that making red wine vinegar was as simple as letting an opened bottle of wine go bad...but it turns out it’s not quite that straightforward.

So we looked to award-winning cookbook author Paula Wolfert—who’s written about and made vinegar and is known for her meticulous research—to guide us.

We field tripped to Paula’s Sonoma home for a vinegar-making tutorial and, over espresso and Valrhona chocolate, she explained why we should bother doing this in the first place: There’s no good red wine vinegar on the market. Commercial manufacturers can make it quickly, so they do—which means that rich, complex flavors never develop.

Paula had several crocks of vinegar in various stages of development, as well as a cupboard filled with bottles of aging vinegar. We sampled her 2006, 2007, and 2008 vintages—they all had far more depth than any I’d tried before—and I was convinced that the only way to get good red wine vinegar is to make it yourself.

To get started, we’d need a crock, red wine, water, and a key component: the mother. The mother is essentially a starting agent, and she’s a shape shifter—depending on her maturity, she can appear as a cloudy mass or a tangible liver lookalike that forms in the top of your crock. Along with her knowledge, Paula would share with us the mother that she’d gotten from a friend more than 40 years ago.

She plunged her hand into the vinegar crock and pulled out the mother, divided it into pieces, and put the pieces into small jars with a bit of mature vinegar. The mothers would be stressed from division so, when we got home, we were to transfer them to bigger jars and feed them water and wine. Then leave them to rest in a dark, warm place while they regained strength. We’d continue feeding our mothers and know they were back in action when they rose to the top of the jars.

Eventually mothers die, and sink to the bottom of the crock (you need to scoop out their remains if they start taking up too much volume.) But it’s no reason to worry—a new mother will form in the old one’s place.

Taking good care of our mothers is critical since they’ll ultimately decide whether we get vinegar or not. If we treat them right, we should be elbow deep in vinegar in just a couple months.

By Lauren Bonar Swezey, Sunset special projects editor

In spite of our recent soggy weather, the test garden is looking fabulous these days. The vegetables are thriving - and so are the weeds! Lucky for us, the chickens LOVE almost any kind of weed we feed them.

The beds are overflowing with cool-season annuals that Ryan, our test garden coordinator, planted last fall after we tore out the warm-season crops that we trialed for the One-Block Feast (we'll plant the final One-Block Feast crops this spring). Here in the West, vegetable gardening goes on 24/7 (all you New Yorkers and Chicagoans, read it and weep). It paid off to prepare the soil with plenty of compost before planting. If it was compacted and clayey, we probably would have had a healthy crop of rotting seedlings thanks to the recent deluges.

Even though we got a late start (we began planting in late October instead of September), we've been harvesting 'Italian' arugula for awhile now. It's great in salads. The girls love it too!

Here you see them just getting a taste of it. Within seconds, they had pecked it down to the ribs...

which, you'll note, I'm holding in my tender little hand. Now I know what it's like to be hen-pecked!

I just harvested our first Romanesco broccoli head, a type of cauliflower that originated in Italy in the 16th century.

We started with nursery-grown seedlings, set them out in the well-composted soil, and have not done a thing to the plants since—not even watered them. They were so easy! And the crop is two to four weeks ahead of our cauliflower and broccoli, which makes Romanesco a good type to grow for an early harvest. The flavor is supposed to be nutty and mild - I can't wait to try it!

Thanks to the recent span of sunny weather, everything else is looking great...

the Chinese cabbage is starting to head up and we're ready to begin plucking leaves from the Romaine and looseleaf lettuces. For the freshest salad, pick a handful of leaves, add a little spicy arugula, and then dress it lightly with a high-quality olive oil and vinegar.

I'm outta here. It's time to go home and start cooking.

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

One by one, our chickens are stepping up to their duties and beginning to lay eggs. Ophelia went first, causing much excitement around these parts. Alana started up a couple of days ago, producing a slender greenish egg that looked a little like a smooth kiwi. Both of them seem unfazed by this radical change in their physiologies. They just calmly deposit in the henhouse and then hop back out to the yard as though nothing’s happened.

Yesterday, it was Carmelita’s turn, the redder of our two Rhode Island Reds. No walk in the park for this chicken, I'm afraid.

Around noon, Jim, Team Chicken’s leader, reported that he’d seen her sitting in one of the nest boxes, shooting her legs in various directions and squawking frantically.

I popped by the coop an hour later and there was no sign of her—in the yard or, when I peered through its window, in the henhouse. Finally I saw a motionless bit of wing up in a nest box and went round to the latched door that leads to it. She was in there all right—scrunched up against the door in a frozen position, her head thrown back and beak open, like a figure in a Napoleonic war painting. Good God. I shut the door quickly. The poor thing clearly needed privacy.

What if that first egg is stuck, I wondered. Or breech or something. Does massage help? I blocked these thoughts and managed to get back to work.

After another hour or so, Jim came into the kitchen, holding her small brown egg—with a hole punched in it, a hole that looked suspiciously beak-size. He’d found Carmelita still in the nest, clucking loudly over her punctured egg, and snatched it before she could do further damage (or worse, acquire a taste for eggs, which apparently some chickens do).

Maybe she was so furious after her wild afternoon that she vented on the egg. Or maybe I am a hopeless anthropomorphist.

Anyway, we blew the contents out of the egg, and now it’s just a peaceful shell with a scar. Here’s hoping things get easier for Carmelita.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

Our delicious olive oil has been sitting in storage since the last week of November. According to our experts, that’s enough time to allow it to settle and the next step is to bottle it.

With 20 gallons of oil, distributed amongst 250ml bottles, we figure we’ll need 322 bottles (That is, if my 6th-grade math is correct.) We’ve been told that dark glass is better because it keeps out light and protects the oil, but surprisingly, it’s not that easy to find—especially now, when all the oil producers who pressed in the fall are hunting for it too. Many glass companies either don’t make green or amber glass in our desired size, or they were weeks away from having any in stock.

I asked Dan Flynn, director of the UC Davis Olive Center, where he gets his bottles from. He directed me to California Glass in Oakland. They had exactly what we wanted, in stock, and for a better price than any of their competitors. I ordered 300 bottles for the oil, figuring that we will keep a little for our own purposes in the test kitchen. Since California Glass has a minimum order of $500 I ordered several dozen clear bottles in the same size and shape for Team Vinegar to make a set. It should all arrive tomorrow and we will probably start bottling our tasty green liquid early next week.

by Margo True, Sunset food editor

We have a new layer! Alana the Ameraucana (aka Martin Van Buren) has at last leapt into the productive phase of her life, after two weeks of suggestive Egg Crouching. Above (on the left) is her first effort, which we know is hers because it's a distinctive mossy green compared to the bluer tint of Ophelia's egg (on the right). Also, though you can't really tell from this photo, it's also noticeably skinnier than Ophelia's. Well, bravo to Alana for popping it out at all. Once she's internally, er, adjusted, we expect fatter eggs. All to enrich our one-block feast this summer.

A happy hen will, we're told, lay an egg a day. How remarkable is that--to reproduce yourself every day!? Hats off to the hard-working chickens.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

First things first: Six weeks ago, we had a sudden panic that our Rhode Island Red Carmelita was a rooster because of her suspiciously shiny feathers. Well, we can put that worry to rest.

Observe:

That, my friends, is Carmelita doing the egg squat. (Also, that is my skirt and completely inappropriate footwear for tromping around in a coop. For future reference: heels + straw = unladylike.)

Up until last Monday, she was still avoiding us when we tried to pet her. No more. Now we have four girls squatting, Ophelia (our layer!), Carmelita, Ruby, and Alana.

That's Alana (aka, Martin Van Buren) and our online editor, Sheila Schmitz (aka, Alana's new best friend).

But things here in Eggland aren't all souffles and really, really good scrambled eggs. We only have one girl laying. (I think. Other members of Team Chicken think Alana's also laying; both their eggs are blue, so it's hard to tell.)

And our girl Ophelia has had a bit of trouble. Last week, I found a completely soft-shelled egg in the straw under their coop. It was egg-shaped, but covered in a rubbery, translucent membrane (the same one you sometimes have to pick off hardboiled eggs). I could see the yolk inside, but it had broken. (I thought about photographing it for the blog, but everyone I showed it to found it gross, so I've refrained, dear reader.)

And the next day, I found another one, but this was in their little yard. It had broken. I imagine they were both from Ophelia, our layer, since she didn't lay an egg those days.

Soft-shelled eggs, while freaky, are apparently fairly normal, especially in chickens that are just starting to lay. In addition to their layen crumble and cracked corn, we're feeding them crushed oyster shells for calcium, which should help them develop that good, thick egg structure. And, of course, lots of greens:  Scraps from the kitchen and, well, weeds. I've been collecting them from the alleys near my house as I walk my dog in the morning. My husband gets embarrassed and has threatened to stop walking with me, but I maintain that by ridding the neighborhood of sow thistle and weedy grasses, I'm doing a public service. It's volunteerism of a sort.

Weeds:

Since then, our Ophelia has laid four good eggs, shell and all.

Now it's time for the others to start doing their part! We are not running a chicken charity here! They need to step up. (To be fair to them, chickens are supposed to get 14 hours of daylight a day to really lay optimally. Right now, we have about 11 hours. Some people use artificial light to stimulate more laying in winter, but we haven't bothered.)

I leave you with a question, readers of the blogosphere:
Our chicken coop is underneath an olive tree. (One of our many olive trees that are infested with the olive fly.) Anyway, it means that tons of olives fall near (and roll into) the coop. The chickens adore the olives; they fight over them, and gulp them down pit and all. Pit and all! And to no apparent ill-effect. So my question is this: Are olives okay for them to eat? I understand that chickens have, er, uncomplicated digestive systems, but this seems dangerous. And yet, they've been eating them for months and never had any trouble.