One of the first products we began to sell alongside our meat was eggs from our flock of now around 200 free range hens. Having had a few beautiful Marans and Welsummer hens since we first married, we initially rescued a number of battery hens every year to provide eggs for the farm shop.  They arrived looking worse for wear, and then slowly but surely, with the help of lots of space to roam, fresh air and plenty of opportunity for a mud bath their feathers grew and their comb and wattle turned bright red. Healthy, happy hens. We also had a few of our Welsummers etc left, including a cockerel who developed a vicious streak and chased anyone who came near him…including most of William’s friends.  These days we buy young poults and they stay here for the rest of their lives. William was the first to take eggs seriously as a business, his couple of years of managing the egg enterprise, whilst still at school, helped him to buy his first car.  A highlight of many school visits is taking the school children into the hen house, to hold a hen for the first time and to collect an egg that is still warm.  

When I have to trudge up to the hen house on a dark, wet November evening to put the hens away I sometimes think, oh this isn’t fun… but then being able to bake a cake, make Yorkshire puddings and scramble an egg with eggs from our hens is just the best. I love our happy hens and we know our customer love them too. We always seem to have one or two mischievous hens in the flock, the most well known being Hen-rietta who knows exactly where to go for her mid morning snack of cake crumbs, before spending her afternoons sitting in the lavender wall outside the farm shop or the straw bale in the pig shed. 

The first Broom House Instagram post back in March 2017 was of our iconic green egg boxes and now we have a beautiful egg box label, designed by Emma. At the moment our hens are laying well and we have no shortage, but there have been times such as during Covid when we have had to ration our egg boxes to one box per customer, hiding them under the counter to make sure no one took more than their fair share… what a crazy time that was. And there’s been many a time over the years when we’ve had to go to the hen house late on an afternoon to grab the next day’s eggs for Alan, Jean, Stephen or Judith (you know who you are!). It’s wonderful to hear the EGG-citement of customers when they come in to tell us that their last box of Broom House eggs had double yolkers in it or how delicious their eggs were.