Tag Archives: Eggs

Celebrate The New Year With Confetti Eggs

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Every week we feature a fun and/or educational activity you can try at home or in the classroom. This week we’ll show you how to make confetti eggs to help ring in the New Year with lots of color.

confetti eggs

Photo credit: Radmegan: In Words and Pictures

Materials:

  • Eggs
  • Wrapping paper scraps
  • Scissors
  • Markers
  • Tissue
  • Glue
  • Bowl

Tap the top of your egg with the scissors, and gently chip away a little hole, about the size of a dime, at the top of the egg. Pour the egg yolks and whites into a bowl to save. Continue making tiny holes in the eggs and empty their contents in the bowl. Cover the bowl and put it in the refrigerator.

Gently rinse the eggshells with warm water. Shake out any liquid from the shells, and place them back in the carton. Put the carton somewhere warm, like a bright windowsill, or on top of the oven, to allow the eggs to dry.

Pick out some leftover wrapping paper; the more colorful the better. If the color isn’t on both sides of the paper, color the white side with markers in colorful patterns. To make the confetti, cut the paper in small square pieces with your scissors, or you can use a hole-punch. Cut above a bowl so the pieces fall into the bowl. Use a variety of wrapping papers and markers to make your confetti as colorful as possible.

Once the eggs are dry, you can decorate the eggshells with your markers (or Easter egg dye, glitter, paint etc.) Once all of the eggs are decorated, stuff each egg to the brim with your recycled wrapping paper confetti.

Next, take the tissue paper and decorate it. Put a thin line of glue around the hole in the eggshell, and press the tissue paper down and around the hole so it seals the hole of the egg. Let the eggs dry in their carton.

Once dry, the confetti eggs are ready to use. Throw them down at midnight and enjoy the burst of color. Happy New Year!

Plenty of Heifer project participants use eggs every day to improve their family’s healthy food consumption and generate income.

Andi Ndreka, 5, holds up eggs gathered from the chicken coop on the family farm in the village of Shelqeti, Albania. Photo by David Snyder, courtesy of Heifer International.

Donate to help impoverished families have eggs every day with chickens, ducks or geese today.

For more information on this activity, or more fun and creative ideas, go to Radmegan: In Words and Pictures.

Nelly’s Egg Business

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Easter, Zatik in Armenian, is one of the most favorite and anticipated holidays in the Christian world. Everybody greets each other on this day, saying, “Christ has arisen,” receiving the response, “Blessed is the resurrection of Christ.” During the Lenten fasting season 40 days before Easter, Armenian families put lentils or other sprouting grains on a tray covered with a thin layer of cotton, and keep it in a lighted place in their homes until Easter, when sprouts appear. These green sprouts, symbolizing spring and awakening of nature, are the “grass” on which people place colored eggs to decorate the Easter table.

In Armenia, the demand for eggs rises on the eve of Easter, when families buy 2-3 dozen eggs to boil and color. They use the festive eggs to decorate the Easter table.

Since the egg is useful and rich in nutrients, its demand is high not only on Easter eve, but almost year-round. This is probably one of the reasons Nelly Arshakyan, a 13-year-old girl from the Business direction of the YES Youth Club functioning in Dalarik community of Armavir region decided to start a small egg production business in her community.

Nelly's Business Plan

Nelly's Business Plan

In the framework of Heifer Armenia’s YANOA (Young Agriculturists Network of Armenia) project, members of the Business direction of YES Youth Clubs are provided with small seed grants to develop business plans and realize their business ideas, based on the theoretic knowledge they gain during business classes.

Since egg production is profitable, Nelly decided to start her own business. She received 40,000 Armenian drams (AMD), or $100, as a seed grant, and plans to buy 40 chickens for AMD 800, or $2, each. She will spend the remaining AMD 8,000 on medicine and feed for the chickens. According to Nelly’s business plan, in three months the chickens will already be grown enough to lay eggs. In the beginning, Nelly is going to save the money she earns from the sale of eggs and pass on the same amount she received to another member of the Club’s Business direction as a seed grant. After that, Nelly is going to invest money generated from her sales into her small business to enlarge it.

Nelly’s initiative of starting an egg production business and her active engagement in the Club’s activities are indeed admirable and praiseworthy. Hopefully next spring she will already have eggs for sale so that we can buy them for Easter. Buying eggs from Nelly will be mutually beneficial, since we will have home-produced eggs and Nelly, in turn, will earn money.

Story by Liana Hayrapetyan, Heifer Armenia Communication and PR Officer.

Donate to Heifer’s Armenia Small Farmer Project.

An Eggs-periment to Test the Strength of a Shell

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Once a week we will be featuring an activity you can try at home or in the classroom. This week’s entry is written by Linda Meyers, with technical know-how and research provided by Liz Elmore, School Programs Intern at Heifer International.

If you have been reading the blog lately you have probably read how much a chicken or rabbit can do for a family in need. If you haven’t, you’ll want to check out a few of the posts, especially this one with an ultra-cool Easter infographic.

Eggs are definitely on our minds this time of year, so we thought it would be a great time to try this mind-bending eggs-periment that will surprise you with its amazing results.

Just how strong do you think an eggs is? To test the strength, try this eggs-tra eggs-iting eggs-periment:

You will need:

  • 4 eggs
  • A towel
  • A pile of books

Directions

  • Crack each egg in half. Put the yolks and whites in a container and store for future use. (Set the pointy half of the shells aside, and after the experiment, you can compost them along with the rest of the shells.)
  • Place a towel on a flat surface and position the eggs on top to make a square, with the dome side of the egg on top.
  • Add books one by one on top of the egg shells so that the weight is distributed evenly.

How many books do you think the eggs can hold before they crack?

Do you think egg shells can protect the insides of an egg?

Eggshell Strength Explained: Just like the Capitol building, eggs contain the shape of a dome.  Did you ever wonder how such a seemingly fragile object like an eggshell can protect the developing embryos of so many animals? In fact, the arched shape of the eggshell is seen in many types of architecture, including bridges and domed buildings. Not only are they architecturally pleasing, domes and arches are very strong, because f the  material they are made of, and their shape. The eggshell of a chicken is composed of layers of calcium carbonate reinforced by a protein matrix. The arched, dome shape of an eggshell can resist the pressure of heavy loads by distributing weight evenly along the structure of the egg. Compression is a force applied to the outside of an object that pushes toward the object’s center, while tension is a pulling, stretching force. Eggshells are tension-weak materials, but are strong in compression. This is why it is difficult to crush an egg by squeezing on its ends (compression forces), but will break when chicks peck from the inside of the egg (tension forces).  So how strong can an eggshell really be? One unbroken eggshell has held up a 200-pound person!

For this and other fun, educational experiments go to the Experiments page on our website.

Now that you know the true strength an egg shell, you may want to learn more about how eggs bring strength to the effort to stop hunger and poverty across the globe.

 

What a Gift of Chickens Really Does

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Over the past few weeks Brooke has been posting about what gifts to Heifer can do for struggling families around the world, the benefits in nutrition and the goods they can use for increased income. Her post about chickens touched on a number of things I saw benefitting the lives of the farmers in the Akumsa-Dumase village in Ghana.

The group of 20 farmers received 20 birds each in a Pass on the Gift ceremony just last year. In that small amount of time, the income for each farmer has at least doubled and their children are healthier—all thanks to the eggs they get from their flocks.

Janet Amoah, 46, runs the egg collection point for her group. She has 40 chickens now, as the sale of eggs brought in enough income for her to double the size of her flock. She gets 30 eggs per day and keeps enough for her family and sells the others. The eggs bring in an extra $60 a month for Janet, and she has plans to expand her poultry operation.

In just one year, Janet says her life has changed completely. For the first time, she says, she doesn’t have to worry about her children’s health or fear that she won’t be able to afford to send them to school.

Chickens are just $20. Would you spend $20 to help change someone’s life? To help send a child in Africa to school? I would.

 

Pick a Chick on Cyber Monday

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It’s Cyber Monday. Don’t let your boss catch you surfing the web for the best deal on a TV. Instead, let her know you’re spending your holiday savings ending world hunger. Pick a chick this Cyber Monday!

For just $20, a gift of chicks, ducks or geese can quickly turn into a sizable flock that can triple a family’s income. The fowl are easily managed as they require little space, and they can help control garden pests and improve soil quality. And through Heifer’s Pass on the Gift model, your gifts will continue to change communities for years to come. Can’t say that about the latest e-reader, now can you?

Photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Anju Chaudhary lost everything she owned when a sudden flood struck her town of Bhandara, Nepal, several years ago. Not long after, Anju’s husband left the house one day and never came back. Anju suddenly found herself all alone with two little children to feed. That’s when she joined a local women’s group, and soon she received the gift of a chicken, which quickly produced eggs and chicks. Anju fed some of the eggs to her children and sold the rest for income. She now has 16 eggs ready to hatch. “We’ll have lots of chickens soon,” Anju says proudly.


Eggs
One large chicken egg contains more than six grams of protein, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization indicates is about half the daily requirement for toddlers. Both chicken and duck eggs contain selenium, which helps build a strong immune system, and B vitamins that help convert food into energy. Plus, chickens and ducks can lay nearly 200 eggs a year.

More Land and Better Crops
Chickens, ducks and geese require little space, so families who have only small plots to farm can maximize what they plant. The fowl eat insects and remove weeds as well, which increases crop yields and provides more food to sell at market or to feed their families.

Increased Income
In addition to providing hundreds of eggs a year or hundreds of chicks, ducklings and goslings to sell at market, these animals thrive on food and garden scraps. That means families don’t have to spend a lot of money to feed the fowl, enabling them to pay for food, education and medicine.

Want to really impress your boss? Give her a Flock of Hope this holiday season. And if it doesn’t already, encourage your organization to participate in our employer matching gifts program, turning your $20 or $60 gift into twice as many birds. Read more blog posts about how Heifer uses fowl to improve lives around the world.

Don’t feel like picking a chick? How about an alpaca, sheep, heifer or goat?

Chickens = Hope in South Africa

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Original story by Magdalena Wos, Heifer International South Africa Country Program resource development officer.

After months of preparations, the dreams of 100 members of the Sukuma Poultry Project came true on Saturday as Heifer provided them each chickens.

Sukuma Poultry Project is located in Mabhaleni Village, near Port Shepstone, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. The Sukuma group was initially established in 2008 and was primary concentrated on broiler production. But without the necessary skills and faced with high feed costs, members of Sukuma group were struggling to generate income and make their businesses profitable. Finally, they decided to contact Heifer and ask for assistance.

Heifer International South Africa started to work with the group at the beginning of this year. A total of 172 initial members of Heifer’s Sukuma Poultry project received training on poultry management, vegetable production and gender equality. On July 18,2011, they were provided with fruit trees like mango, banana or avocado. But the biggest change, a gift of livestock, was still ahead of them.

During last couple of months, families and Heifer staff worked hard together to prepare chicken enclosures and get the farmers ready to receive livestock. Over the past two weekends, for the first 100 project members the happy day finally came, and 2,550 chickens were delivered to them. The chickens will begin laying eggs within days, providing a rich source of protein to the families and income from selling eggs to others in their communities.

The remaining 72 families will receive chickens during next couple of months.

World Egg Day: Are Backyard Chickens Right For You?

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Happy World Egg Day!

We talk a lot about how chickens (and ducks and geese) and their eggs can have a great impact on Heifer project participant families. But you don’t have to live on a farm in Honduras (or even Indiana) to see the benefits of raising domestic birds for their eggs.

Purslane in her chicken tractor 

In fact, my family has a tiny flock of chickens in our backyard. In Little Rock, Arkansas. In my neighborhood, this is actually not that uncommon (admittedly, most of the other chicken-raising families are friends of ours).

The decision to take on an animal, whether a pet or livestock, should be made after careful consideration and even research. The same is true for backyard chickens. We decided to begin raising chickens for several reasons: we want to have eggs from animals we know are healthy and well taken care of, we want to reduce our “footprint” by having a source of food right out our back door, and we want our daughter to know where some of her food comes from.

Here are a few things to consider if you’re thinking about raising chickens in an urban setting.

  • Do you like eggs? This seems obvious, but if you really only sort-of like them, they won’t be worth the investment of time and money. If you do a lot of baking, however, these are the freshest eggs you’ll ever have.
  • Is your yard/situation appropriate for chickens? Our flock started out in a bottomless pen (sometimes called a chicken tractor), but now they’re totally free range, which wouldn’t be possible without our six-foot security fence (or with bloodthirsty dogs). Our friends down the street have a chicken coop.  
  • Are you even allowed to have chickens? The best way to find out is to check the municipal code for your city. The requirements in Little Rock are that chickens must have a minimum of three square feet of floor space per bird over four months of age, they must be kept at least five feet from the owner’s residence, and they must be kept at least 25 feet from the nearest neighbor. Pretty laid back. Just across the river in North Little Rock, however, you have to have a permit, and the minimum distance from neighboring houses is 75 feet (this was a deal-breaker for a friend of mine thinking of starting a flock).
  • How many do you want? Chickens lay an egg about every 24 to 26 hours. We started out with four chickens, and for the three of us, we were up to our eyeballs. It’ll make you pretty popular with your friends and colleagues if you’re always giving away eggs. We now have two gals, and this seems to be a good number for us to maintain. We always have eggs when we want them, and though we aren’t giving them away by the dozen anymore, we can generally be relied on for friends in a pinch.
A common misconception is that you have to have a rooster, or else your hens won’t lay eggs. This is not true. You need a rooster if you want your eggs to hatch into baby chicks. But if you’re raising chickens in your backyard so you can eat the eggs… you probably don’t want that to happen. Many cities won’t allow the noisy boys anyway.
If your’e interested in chickens, here are a few things to check out:

World Egg Day: How to Safely Prepare Eggs

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Note: The video in this post mentions a “recent egg recall.” Don’t fret! This video is from August 2010, and to my knowledge, there is no current egg recall to be concerned about.

Happy World Egg Day!

Although I generally enjoy cooking and am pretty decent in the kitchen, there are a handful of basics I just can’t seem to commit to memory. Cooking rice (to stir or not to stir, lid on or off?). Boiling potatoes (wait for the water to boil or add potatoes to cold water?). And hard boiled eggs.

Messing up hard boiled eggs can make for hard-to-peel eggs with weird green yolks, plus there’s the whole egg safety thing to consider. I found this video from the American Egg Board’s YouTube channel, along with some other interesting egg-related how-to videos. This Jeffrey Saad knows his egg cooking, and I think I might finally be able to perfect my hard boiled egg (see one, do one, teach one?). Oh, and I also learned from it that I’ve been making scrambled eggs less-than-perfect. Ah, well.

Happy World Egg Day

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It’s World Egg Day!

Eggs are awesome. Highly nutritious, easy to store and prepare. You can eat all sorts of eggs: chicken eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, and more. There are loads of ways to eat them: hard boiled, scrambled, poached, fried, and on and on. You can read more about eggs in last year’s winter World Ark.

Many Heifer participant families raise chickens or ducks for their eggs. They’re a great way for a family to  help meet their protein needs; and with a large enough flock, earning some income off the surplus is a real bonus.

Give the gift of chicks, ducks or geese, and empower families to provide for themselves.

Stay tuned throughout the day as we celebrate World Egg Day here on the Heifer Blog.