Confessions of an Author

How to Hatch an Egg 1 How to Hatch an Egg by Anne E Thompson To hatch an egg, first you need a fertilised egg (which the eggs you buy in the supermarket might be but probably are not!) To obtain a fertilised egg, you either need one of these: (a male of the species you hope to hatch!) or  you can buy them. I buy them from ebay and they are posted to me in clever polystyrene boxes. When you have your eggs, you either have to begin growing it at once, or keep it somewhere cool (like a garage) and turn it once a day. Fresh eggs have much the best chance of survival. However, I did once want to fill a half-empty incubator and used an egg that had been in the fridge for two weeks. It hatched into a perfectly healthy duckling which we named ‘Cupcake’. In the wild, the mother bird will lay one egg per day in the nest and leave them until she has enough to sit on. Ducks will sit on about twenty. So, should you find a nest in the wild with cold eggs ...

How Long Can I Keep Eggs For? (And do they need to be kept in a fridge?) When hens lay eggs, they do not come with the neat red ‘use-by’ date stamped on them, so it can be difficult to know how long to keep them before they should be thrown away. I have done a little research. There are four types of eggs – fresh ones, stale ones, bad ones, poisonous ones. You can eat the first two, and will be ill and possibly die if you eat the fourth choice. You would never eat the third choice – bad eggs – because they stink, so we can ignore those. We’ll start with the poisonous ones. Poisons, or ‘pathogens’ in eggs are different bacteria. The worst of these seems to be salmonella, a rod shaped bacilli which causes salmonellosis (which can put you in hospital). Salmonella lives in the gut of animals, and seems to affect a lot of chickens (possibly because they have been farmed so badly). Salmonella affects other animals too, it is only chickens who get bad press. You should be careful aro...