A few years ago I gave up eating eggs.

Living in another country, all I could buy were bland-tasting eggs with pale yolks, different from the tasty, orange-yolked Barnevelder eggs at home.

There’s nothing like a perfectly poached egg on a golden piece of toast, sprinkled with freshly ground pepper.

Or eggs lightly scrambled with a handful of chopped parsley straight from the garden. The simple egg is a joy on the palate.

This is the time of year to eat eggs. Chooks are churning them out. My girls produce nine a day.

People have their favourite egg colours but to me it doesn’t matter whether they’re white, brown or those disturbing pale blue ones from Araucanas. They taste the same.

The colour is simply a matter of pigment, porphyrin creating a brown outer shell with white inside and oocyanin making a blue eggshell inside and out.

At egg producing time come oddities. Lumpy, bumpy shells. A hen laying for the first time, a pullet, may produce a shell-less egg, weird to touch, an egg in a translucent skin.

It’s because the pullet hasn’t got the system going right yet; the next egg is usually fine.

Shell-less eggs can also happen if your chooks’ diet isn’t right. The point of feeding them shell grit along with their grain is to give them the right amount of calcium.

Some people fret about whether they should eat fertilised eggs. 

Don’t fret, eat. They taste the same as unfertilised and they look just the same so you can’t tell.

What to do with all these eggs? Family and friends love them.

Or preserve them. Don’t wash the eggs, seal their porous shells with clarified butter and set them wide end down in a bed of bran in a container.

Cover the first row with bran then start the next row on top, and so on. Don’t have any egg touching another.

Come autumn, when your chooks are in moult and not laying, chomp on your preserved stash.

Happy chooks, happy life.