Home and Away: More Tales of a Heritage Farm

By Anny Scoones

In her best-selling first book, Home: Tales of a Heritage Farm (2005), Anny Scoones introduced readers to historic Glamorgan Farm. In Home and Away, Anny presents more stories about the joys and sorrows, excitements and mishaps and also takes readers farther afield, sharing with them her travels to other parts of Canada, to New York and to such places as Malaysia and Belarus. Her travel tales offer not only her keen observations on what she sees and experiences while away, but also her perspective from afar on the importance of having a place to return to that truly is home.

Anny has owned Glamorgan Farm since 2000. Located in North Saanich, B.C., it's one of the original farms and homesteads on Vancouver Island, established in 1870 by Richard John. She is restoring the historic structures and raising heritage breeds of livestock. The front meadows are gardened by an herb gardener and a group of mentally challenged adults who grow organic, heirloom varieties of flowers and produce.

Anny writes candidly and colourfully about real things, from visits with her family-she is the daughter of internationally acclaimed artists Molly Lamb Bobak and Bruno Bobak-to simple pleasures like arranging bowls of pears and hearing the owls in the woods at dusk. She writes about making bonfires, sitting with a dying horse, playing with a 700-pound sow and visiting the SPCA. Some of her tales are told with humour, some in sadness, but all tell the truth about living, observing and creating, whether at home or away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926971230

Anny Scoones

Anny Scoones was raised in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has served as an elected city councillor, and now teaches English in Victoria. Anny lives in the neighbourhood of James Bay in Victoria, British Columbia.

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egg surprises

Collecting and selling eggs is one of the most relaxing and rewarding activities on Glamorgan Farm. There is a surprise every time you do it. What will you find? A blue egg? A double-yolker? Chickens don’t lay every day—that would exhaust them—and they take the winter off to rest. But come spring they start up again. To encourage them, I give them fresh hay every morning in their private nesting boxes.

The delicate Polish Crested hens, who lay white eggs, sport plumes that look like the hats the Queen Mother used to wear to the horse races at Ascot. The Naked Neck hens, a very rare breed that originated in Hungary when a farmer bred a hen to a turkey, have long, red, wrinkled necks and lay large brown eggs. My oldest Naked Neck, Olga, is 13. The Araucana are large, multicoloured hens from South America. Their eggs have blue or green shells. And then there’s my dear little red bantam, Jennifer, who hasn’t laid an egg in years. She prefers to spend her days sitting on the barn windowsill. Big Rusty, the Rhode Island Red rooster, is also from a breed now on the rare list. Big Rusty struts around the pen guarding his varied flock and is always the last one to go inside at night, carefully making sure that none of the hens are still outdoors, vulnerable to a raccoon attack.

As chickens are about to lay, they cluck a little and then start squawking, as if to tell the entire planet what they have done. When the egg first appears, it is covered in a thin, clear coating. A hen likes to sit on her egg for a while, and then she leaves. Occasionally, another hen will come along and eat the eggs—I’m not sure why—so I make sure to pick them up regularly.

Chickens have a very full day. Besides laying their eggs and contemplating life for long hours in their hay boxes, they like to have dust baths. First they scratch out a hole, picking at grubs as they go along. Then they roll in the cool soil, and sometimes lie down sideways there and go to sleep. They look positively dead with their scaly yellow legs sticking straight out of the hole.

Here’s a good daily egg routine:

1. Check for eggs regularly throughout the day, beginning at 9:00 in the morning, because different hens have different routines. The last egg is usually laid at about 4:00 pm. Look for eggs not only in the chickens’ nesting boxes but under bushes and in secret places. Some hens are very private and don’t like to lay in public. Sometimes a hen gets caught short, too, and lays an egg outside.

2. Don’t leave eggs where greedy portly Labradors or other farm dogs can get at them. You might want to crack a fresh egg every so often for the barn cat, though. My cat Annabelle loves them.

3. Wash your eggs in cool water. Look over each one carefully. An egg may be cracked if the chicken stood up as it landed and the egg hit the surface too hard. Set aside only the clean, well-shaped eggs to sell. Some eggs are very misshapen but still good to eat, so you can save those for yourself.

4. Dry the eggs and put them in a carton. Arrange the eggs nicely, perhaps in a colour-coded pattern. I like to mix the blue, white, brown and pinkish eggs in a nice design, decorating them with a clean feather and including a sheet that describes the eggs from each breed of