With Pesach approaching, you’re probably wondering, What are we going to do about eggs this year? Should we raise our own chickens? It has to be cheaper.

I have chickens. As mentioned in previous columns, I got two chicks—there’s Yapchick, who’s my main chicken, and there’s Mo, who’s my emergency backup chicken. Yapchick was brought in by my daughter, who teaches kindergarten, and when we found out that chickens can’t live alone, my son Daniel brought home a second chicken (from his friend’s farm), which he named Mo.

For the most part, we’re not really pet people, but chickens are pets that give something back: Eggs. You can’t put a price on that.

Well, actually, you can, but it’s not a price I can print in a family newspaper.

The eggs are not free. For one thing, you have to get a coop. Fortunately, Daniel, who’s a budding contractor, built a coop, and it cost only a few hundred dollars in materials.

You also have to build a nest within the coop. The nest has to be in a secluded corner because chickens like privacy when they’re laying. Though they don’t mind climbing in on top of each other if need be and getting their privacy at once.

But as it turns out, chickens don’t just lay eggs where you decide they should lay eggs. They might choose a random corner, and then the eggs can get stepped on and broken. They’re raw eggs.

So the question is, how do you get the chickens to know that you want them to lay in the nest? Should you post some kind of sign? Point at the nest, and then lay an egg yourself?

Pretty much. We had to borrow a fake egg that we could put in the nest in order to convince the chickens that someone had gone in there and decided it was a good spot to lay.

They probably had a discussion about it:

“Where did this egg come from? Is it yours?”

“No.”

“Did the humans lay this?”

“I don’t know how humans work.”

You also have to feed them. Chicken feed itself is inexpensive—in fact, it’s a synonym for inexpensive—but if you want your eggs to have that special taste that differentiates, for example, backyard-grown tomatoes from store-bought tomatoes, you can’t just feed them the same pellets that egg factories do.

Fortunately, chickens eat everything that people eat. So we feed them leftovers. B”H, you can feed chicken leftovers, which is more than I can say for my kids.

Second of all, if you’re thinking about producing your own eggs for Pesach, you’re probably too late. Last Pesach my family used 14 dozen eggs. I don’t know how many chickens you plan to get to meet those numbers in time for Pesach, but the average chicken lays six eggs per week maximum, and only once they’re adults. And before they’re adults, you don’t know what genders you have.

You also want to make sure that your chickens are kosher. Apparently, not all breeds are. They need a mesorah. And only kosher chickens lay kosher eggs.

Yapchick is kosher. The question is Mo. Mo doesn’t have a big red comb, and it has five toes on each foot.

And you’re thinking, If it has five toes, it’s not a chicken. So I looked it up. No birds have five toes. There are only five breeds of any kind of birds with five toes, and they’re all chickens. Mo doesn’t look like any of them. And no rav I’ve sent adorable pictures to has been able to identify it. So we can’t eat its eggs until it brings us a shtar yichus.

But the thought was that for now we were keeping it, because Yapchick still needed an emotional support companion. And if Yapchick turned out to be a boy, we were getting rid of all the chickens anyway, because this whole society was built around Yapchick in the first place.

And I say society, because then we got a third chicken. I mentioned a few months back that we made a bar mitzvah for our son Gedalyah. Well, on the Thursday before the bar mitzvah, Daniel, who is amazing at reading the room, showed up in our backyard with a white chicken. He’d decided—as a bar mitzvah present—to surprise Gedalyah with a chicken. Like an old-timey bar mitzvah present.

For this new chicken, we decided to go with the name Henshe. We figured that name is very woke, in that it says what she is, and it gives her preferred pronoun.

We didn’t see our first egg until November, when Mo started laying her treif eggs.

And we’re like, “Okay, Mo’s a girl. Should we change her name? What girls’ names start with Mo?” Morah.

Then we found out that Henshe’s a rooster. Should we change his name? To what? “Boychick?”

I feel like whatever clever name we give a chicken when we get one, it turns out to be the wrong name for the gender it actually is. I don’t get ruach hakodesh when I name chickens; I get whatever the opposite of ruach hakodesh is.

The question, then, is what is Yapchick?

Apparently, it’s a boy’s name, because as it turns out, Yapchick is a girl.

I was nervous about tasting her eggs because I wanted them to taste different than store-bought eggs. Also, if you have an egg that doesn’t taste like the eggs you’re used to, you immediately throw it out.

Turns out the eggs taste more like regular eggs than eggs do. They’re definitely much better, or so I have to tell myself.

But even once the eggs start coming, they’re not guaranteed every day. You have to feed the chickens protein because eggs are made of protein, and they have to come from somewhere. And protein is expensive. Eggs are the cheapest protein.

So mostly, we’ve been giving them leftover cholent. Though Henshe eats most of it.

The goal was to pay less to maintain the chickens than it would cost to buy that amount of eggs. And right now, I have to keep three chickens alive for two weeks to get one dozen eggs. And that’s if Yapchick remembers to eat her protein. And doesn’t accidentally drop her eggs. And if there are no blood-spot shaylos, which there are about half the time.

But at least we get free eggs! Depending on how you define free.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].