Miniature Eggs

My new hens have been laying for a few weeks now and things are progressing nicely.  I am now getting 15-20 eggs a day.  I seem to be in the miniature egg business now.  I am not complaining at all, mind you.  I would much rather have my girls lay small tiny eggs and slowly progress to larger normal sized eggs as their bodies can handle it, than have them start laying huge eggs right off the bat and prolapse.  My Comets did that - it was not pretty.

Thing do seem to be progress very slowly.  The first Easter Eggers layers are still laying tiny eggs.  Some have not caught on to the concept of laying their eggs in the nest boxes.   I am finding a cluster of 3 to 4 eggs in one corner of the coop every day.  I even found an egg under the hedge bush yesterday!  I try talking to the girls and telling them in a gentle tone that they need to start laying their eggs in the nest boxes and ask if anyone has any questions.  They all nod their head in agreement they they got it and no one ever asks any questions so I think I am getting through to them.....maybe not.

I had one hen hop up on the helper perch below the egg boxes look around in each nest box nod her head, look up at me and say "Oh!  I see. Nope I still don't get it."  and hop down.  Goofy bird.  Most of them are getting it and doing well with laying in the nest boxes.

I was on another business trip all last week.  I had to go to our site in Virginia to so some audits.  I got to meet some of my co-workers for the first time.  I work with some fantastic people and we have a very busy productive week.  I came back home to a full egg fridge!  Almost all of these are the miniature eggs.  I am still getting a few regular sized eggs from my old hens.  Now I have to scramble and fry up several dozen of these to give back to the hens.

I also have to make cupcakes next week for a school picnic.  I have to figure out how many mini eggs equal a regular jumbo egg.  I think I will go with 2 to 1 ratio.  Since it is still early here and my boys are not up yet I could fix breakfast for them as well.  "Here honey, I fried you up a half a dozen eggs for breakfast!"  :o)  We are used to it here, but it is a funny scenario to suggest to someone who buys our eggs.

Have a great day everyone!  Maybe I should approach the egg council to do some recipes/promos for them.....hummm...    :o)

Moving Day

I went about my normal routine that I do every weekend.   I am always up by 630am if not earlier, the product of having to get up at 4am every day during the week.  I do my thing and head out to the chickens.  I give both the old hens and the babies scratch grains and we all chat about what is new and the latest gossip.

I got around to the babies nursery building and I peeked in and what do you know....way in the back of the  nursery I spied this:

Well this sparked  a whole laundry list of things to do!  I had to call the U-Haul company, call the phone, water, and TV companies to have service stopped.  So much to do!  I had to scramble eggs!  So much to do so little time.  Not to mention it is hotter than all get out.

I finished chatting with the chickens and hand feeding them some grass and then headed inside to start things rolling.

I  cooked up a little more than a dozen eggs.  Why you may ask?  There is a good reason.  I gave the older hens the scrambled eggs to fill their bellies (ok ok their gizzards) with protein.  This will discourage pecking when we integrate the babies into the big coop with them.  The eggs and protein also  seem to make the hens a little more docile and easier going.  This will help the introduction go smoother.

I woke up my hubby, and son and had a good breakfast, while we talked about how to move the babies with as little trauma  as possible.  We devised and plan and out the door we went.  First we had to get all the babies into their nursery.  Then we had to keep them there while we closed off their pop door.  To do this we just stapled some chicken wire over the pop door opening.  Then I picked up all the bricks holding down the big blue tarp and took out all the stuff from inside their nursery.

Together the three of us slowly picked up the nursery and we walked it to a new location out of the mud and chicken poo.  The babies were not too cooperative so we decided not to try to walk them around to the big coop door as we had planed.  Instead we took off the top of the nursery and I started grabbing birds.  I would quickly grab a chicken and hand her off to my Son who would carry her over to the coop where Hubby was manning the door.  We did this over and over, one by one, chicken by chicken for all 25.  It took some time and I only got pooped on once, and bit once.  Not too bad considering I was really scaring them.  No chickens (or people) were harmed during this process.  Although, I was wing slapped in the face a few times.  Thankfully I did not loose my glasses!

Once we had them all in the main run, I filled their waters while the boys mixed their feed.  Just like changing a dog's food you want to mix the old with the new  - we had to mix the chick feed with the layer feed.  I then slowly corralled all the birds from the run into the coop, and we shut the pop door for about an hour.  Since our babies were used to using a pop door they knew how it worked and knew that beyond the pop door was either shelter or a yard depending which way they were going.

They were hot and they duked it out a little bit but all in all the hour they were locked in together with the old hens seemed to go well.  While they were locked up, we quickly dismantled the nursery and set the pieces behind the coop to wash off in the rain - should we get any- and to get it out of the site of the babies.  Out of site out of mind.  They will forget they had a different home and will only know their new home as their only home.  We left the fencing up for now.  It was too hot by this time and I was melting into a gross puddle in my insulated boots.

We also found out that our one mystery chick in indeed a roo.  He has been crowing for a few weeks now.  He is aggressive when I had feed them grass but he has not tried to attack - yet.  He seemed pretty docile when I grabbed him to move him.  Maybe he will be a nice roo.....hey a girl can hope!

Now I have to find some of the golf balls we have laying around to put in the nest boxes.  Why golf balls you ask?  Well the golf balls with look like eggs to the chickens and it will teach the babies where to lay their eggs - in the nest boxes.  It works quite well.  This way using golf balls I can keep collecting the eggs several times a day so they don't get trampled but still leave a visual learning aid for the new hens.

 I only have one new hen laying so far but the rest will start soon.  This is kinda early for them.  We got these peeps April 4, 2011, and today July 31, 2011, 3.5 months later, they are starting to lay.  The new eggs will be pretty tiny bit totally whole.  Soon they will start laying huge eggs and double and triple yolks while their bodies figure things out and they settle into a laying routine.  Now a new issue starts for me - soon I will be getting up to 32 eggs A DAY!  I need to order some egg cartons....and make a sign for the road.....and buy a bigger fridge...make more cookies, cakes, and goodies.  oh my.

Yummy Healthy Summer Squash and Eggs

I love summer yellow squash.  We usually plant a few plants and end up with more squash that one could ever use!  Since it is still way too early to be planting the garden in this neck of the woods, we bought some straight neck yellow squash at the store.  The sat around as we got too busy to cook them up that night or the next night, or the next.  So not wanting them to go bad I finally cooked them up and we all gobbled them down.  I had to make sure I packed my lunch before we all started eating so I would be sure to have some of this yummy dish for my next day's meal.

It is super simple, super easy, and wonderfully tasty.   It is a good source of vitamins and protein when it is completed with the eggs.  Head on over to the What's Cookin page for the full recipe!

Eggs

We got chickens because I really wanted them.  I am not really an egg eater but I do eat scrambled eggs.  I do however, bake...a lot.  I thought it would also be a good marketing point to my baking to have on site fresh ingredients such as eggs.  We started out with 6 hens a few years ago.  We also got 3 ducks that year....that is for another day... a post sure to have to laughing out loud!  Last year we added 8 more hens to the flock.  Over the years we have learned a lot about chickens, coops, nurseries, brooder, and eggs.  I will save the brooder, nursery, and coop info for another day and go with the eggs today.

First off you do not need a rooster to have eggs from the hens.  This for some reason is a mystery to a lot of people.  If you do not have a rooster you will still get eggs.  If you have a rooster you may get some fertilized eggs.  You can still eat the fertilized eggs and you will never know the difference.

Fresh eggs taste so much better than the store bought eggs.  This is typically due the diet and living conditions of the small backyard (in my case front yard) chicken owner.  My birds get to free range as much as possible.  They eat all kinds of grass, weeds, and bugs from the yard.  I also feed then a high quality feed pellets and scratch grains.  All this combined together makes for a tastier egg.

When a young hen starts to lay eggs at about 6 months old their bodies need time to adjust to the laying process.  Sometimes you get colossal eggs like this one:

Usually when they start out the eggs are tiny and grow in size each week as they lay more and more and their bodies adjust.  My hens will lay every day.  As they get older, the 3 year old hens still lay 3 or 4 days a week.  That is not bad for a chicken that old.  When you get about a dozen eggs a day they quickly take over your fridge!  I have a medium dorm sized fridge just to store the eggs in.  Sometimes I have to store them in the regular fridge because I have so many.  When that happens, I start scrambling a few dozen eggs up at a time and giving them back to the birds.  They love them, and they need the protein.  When  I boost their protein intake they tend to not pick on each other as much.  They will peck each other in boredom of being cooped up too long like many days this winter.

Every now and then a newly laying hen will encounter total process confusion.  I have found shell-less eggs in the nest boxes.  That is exactly what it sounds like.  The egg is laid without have a shell at all, just the insides.  makes a mess to clean up.  Some eggs are lain that are all wrinkly or have a flat end.  This is caused when the egg shell is being formed inside the hen and there is another egg bumping up against the first one.  She is basically making eggs too fast.  These eggs are edible, the shells just don't look the best.

Occasionally I will go out to get the eggs and find a soft shelled egg.  See eggs are complex packages.  The edible part of the egg is encapsulated in 2 layers of shell.  The soft shell in inside the outer hard shell.  The hard outside shell protects the egg from damage and is porous to allow the egg to 'breath'.  There is in inside soft shell that protects the edible part of the egg and the growing peep if there is to be one.

 I have gotten several soft shell eggs from my girls over the years.  When this happens I supplement their food with oyster shell crumbles.  Providing them the oyster shell boosts their calcium and allows them to make hard shells again.  I usually mix some oyster shell in their feed bucket all the time.  I have gotten some eggs that were very tough to crack!  My hens are very healthy, but they do run into problems that are out of my control.

Some chicken breeds are just better than others.  My first round of chickens were a mixed group of Rhode Island Reds, White Leghorns, Black Sexlinks, and Easter Eggers.  All of these birds were/are fantastic layers, hardy, and generally friendly birds.  The second group of birds I got were Red Comets.  I am not pleased with these at all.  They are fragile, mediocre layers, and not friendly birds.  This year we are looking to get some more RIRs, Easter Eggers, and maybe some Buffs.

Since we live in a pretty much wide open field, other wild birds have taken to laying eggs in strange places.  This bird laid her eggs in her nest that she built on our truck tire!  The truck was not used that much and she made the nest up under the wheel well high on the tire.

Speaking of strange places to make a nest and lay eggs can you spot the egg in this picture?

This is a Killdeer nest.   These birds like to nest on the ground and in wide open fields.  This nest was on the edge of our driveway in the gravel.  There were 4 eggs in this nest, 3 hatched and this one was a dud.    We find Killdeer nests all over the yard.  They are a bit of a pain in the butt, however we do what we can to accommodate them and let them alone until their eggs hatch.