94 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



shell are permanently wide open, and evaporation 

 and deterioration are accelerated. 



Thus an egg may be a literal twenty-four hours 

 old and still be on the stale side. If it is the prod- 

 uct of an undersize, underfed hen; if it is left in 

 the nest as long as five or six hours; washed when 

 collected, and then stored in a hot or arid atmos- 

 phere it will not be as fresh as a good egg, well 

 cared for, that is a week to ten days old. 



In no other branch of home-farming so much 

 as in poultry production is one repaid for follow- 

 ing two fundamental rules that apply throughout 

 the curriculum. The first is to stick to the best ob- 

 tainable stock. Some of my friendliest critics ask 

 me if I never make mistakes on Medlock Farm. 

 Plenty. One of them was my first venture into 

 chicken-keeping. I was impatient to get going but 

 disinclined to pay the safe price for speed. I bought 

 a crate of live hens at auction, figuring we would 

 start having eggs at once. These hens were scrubs, 

 undernourished and exhausted. They sickened and 

 died that first winter without producing a single 

 egg. I lost ten dollars and some three to six months' 

 progress on that end of the program. 



But I had learned my lesson. I still did not feel 

 like risking bigger money to get started right, and 

 at once. So the following fall I bought a small, oil- 

 burning incubator and raised my own pure-bred 

 New Hampshire Reds, a breed later admitted to 



