Tag: egg

The Chicken Chronicles

Well, I meant to post this last week, but for some reason I forgot about it.  So, you will get last week’s post and an update to last week’s post.  🙂

Another week, another chicken problem. It seems Red has hurt her leg somehow. Red, by the way, is any one of the Rhode Island Reds, as we cannot really tell them apart. Anyhow, we have had to separate her to keep the others from picking on her, and to keep her from trying to go up and down the stairs in the coop. We’re also giving her half a baby aspirin at least two times a day. Right now she is avoiding standing on that foot, but I cannot see anything wrong with it. That leads me to believe she might have sprained it somehow.

 In other chicken news, we built a small coop for the babies (the Welsummers) so they can start staying outside all the time. The silly girls wouldn’t go into it the first night though, acting like young kids the first time they try to camp out. 😀 We finally decided to bring them in after listening to crying for an hour. Maybe they will get used to it decide to sleep in it. It won’t be long until it is time to integrate them with the rest of the girls.

 We had a good week of laying both weeks, including one day where all of the older birds laid eggs – that hasn’t happened often at all.

This week’s update: Red is doing much better.  She is now back in the coop with her sisters, and while she is still favoring her leg, she is much, much better.

Since last week, we have put ankle bracelets on three of the Rhode Island Reds, and amazingly we can now see who rules the roost!  There is one of them, tentatively named Pink (because of the pink bracelet) who is obviously at the top of the pecking order, and it seems Blue (you guessed it, a blue bracelet) who seems to be #2).  The Easter Eggers seem to not really care either way, but they do recognize Pink’s authority.  It’s funny how we could never notice that without some identifier of who was who.

The most exciting news this week, and a far change from what I expected given the update above, is that the babies, the Welsummers, ran into the big girls’ coop one day when they were out running around, and they showed no interest in coming back out.  The older ladies are picking on them some, but they seem to be holding their own, so this is where they will stay.  🙂

Egg Hacks

I love eggs, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t eat at least four of them.  Needless to say, I love egg hacks, and while I knew some of them in the video on this page, I didn’t know them all.  Just a tip though – don’t use a bowl of water to crack your eggs.  It is much easier in a drinking glass.  😀  I also find two eggs in the glass does better than one.

The Chicken Chronicles

As I wrote yesterday, this has been a hard week.  The weather has been far less than desirable, which has meant that our chicken coop has had the tarp over it all week long.  That usually takes a toll on the Easter Eggers, but they actually had a pretty good egg laying week.  The totals ended up being 20 for the Rhode Island Reds and 20 for the Easter Eggers, but that is not the big news for the week.  The toughest part of the week may not have been the weather, it may have been the day a hen had to lay this egg!

The Giant Egg Compared to a Quarter

The Giant Egg Compared to a Quarter

The Giant Egg in an Egg Carton

The Giant Egg in an Egg Carton

Look at the size of that thing compared to the others!  It is monstrous!  In fact, it was nearly 3 times as large as a typical egg.  If you are like me, you want to know what is inside of that thing though.  Well, you get to find out.  I videoed the cracking of the egg, revealing something you may not be expecting.  Check it out!

Candidly, I hope that is the last monstrous egg I see, but if nothing else, it made for an interesting video.  🙂

How to Peel Egg

I am always fascinated by the videos and tutorials on how to peel eggs better.  Yes, I am easily humored, I know.  Seriously though, the OCD in me goes nuts when an egg doesn’t peel well.  I have read in more than one place that fresh eggs would not peel as well as older eggs, but I am not finding that to be the case.  Since I have been cooking fresh eggs, I have found the eggs are peeling significantly better.  I can’t help but to wonder why that is.  Even so, I am still always on the lookout for a better way to peel eggs, and this one intrigues me.  In fact, I plan on giving it a try this morning.  I’ll report back here before this post goes live.

How to peel an egg.

So the results are in – this works!  It isn’t quite as smooth as the video seems to indicate, but it does work without tearing the egg up.  I’ll be using this method going forward, at least until something better comes along.

The Chicken Chronicles

I knew it was bound to happen.  This is the first week that the ladies have went down in their egg production. Last week the ladies laid 38 eggs, and I had hoped for about 42-44 this week, but they only laid 36.  I am not sure if this was just an off week — they did have two days where the numbers were low, or if the time of year has come where the amounts will begin to decrease.  That said, today was a seven egg day.

OH!  Speaking of today’s eggs – I have long had a suspicion that one of the Easter Eggers is laying a “pink” egg.  I put that in quotes, because it looks quite similar to the brown eggs of the Rhode Island Reds, just lighter in color.  I have been waiting for the day where five brown eggs show up because that would mean that lighter one is indeed a pink egg from an Easter Egger.  That has yet to happen, but today something just about as good happened.  Four brown eggs were laid today and none of them were lighter in color.  This almost certainly means that the lighter colored egg is from an Easter Egger.

I kind of dread the winter with the girls.  Even now, when we don’t get out there as soon as the sun is up, they have their coop in a mess.  We could leave the door to the run open, but I like the added protection it offers.  Even so, come winter we may have to leave it closed some to keep the warmth in with the hens.  Only time will tell, I suppose.

The Chicken Chronicles

The ladies have really stepped it up this week.  Their previous record on eggs was 25 a week, and this week they layed seven more, upping that record to 32!  The most interesting thing is the Easter Eggers are hardly laying at all yet.  They are only averaging 2.3 eggs a week per bird, and once they are laying at full capacity this should be around 5 eggs a week per bird.

Oh, I do have an egg pic to share this week.  This is from their record day of SEVEN EGGS!

Seven eggs!  This is the most we have gotten in a single day to this point.

Seven eggs! This is the most we have gotten in a single day to this point.

Even though the run is secure, we have always locked the ladies in their coop at the end of the day.  I figure that this is an added layer of security if a raccoon or opossum gets into the run during the night.  Well, about a week or so ago we found two birds hanging out below the coop in the run when we went down to let them out in the morning!  These two ladies had presumably suffered all night outside of the coop.  Determined this would never happen again, we have been diligently watching for this at night.  Well, on Saturday night when we went down to shut the door, there were two of the Easter Eggers sleeping on a roosting pole in the run!  Those silly ladies!  We ended up leaving the door open that night, but going forward we will pull that roosting pole out toward the end of the day to prevent this from happening again.

The ladies are getting more brave.  I might have mentioned this last week, but I will say it here again.  In the past, they would stay all together and relatively close to the run when we let them out to stretch their wings and eat some grass.  In fact, let me back up.  In the beginning, we would move them from the run to a dog cage, where they could get fresh grass, but be protected.  As soon as we were confident that they could take care of themselves, we began letting them run in the yard, but what did they do?  They ran to the dog cage!  Finally they got past that, and then they would all hang close to the run together.  Then they started wandering a little further away, but generally together.  Now they are going all over the back yard, and sometimes they are going solo.  It’s nice to see them getting more brave, but it also makes it harder to round them up to go back in the run.

All this typing about them running around the yard is making me long for the proper homestead property even more.  One day …

A Few More Eggs

WOW!  I can’t tell you how excited I was yesterday to find out that we had not just one more egg (see: My Surprise for the Day), but THREE MORE EGGS!  Not only that, but one of the Easter Eggers, we believe it was Blondie, laid an egg!

Three New Eggs

Three New Eggs

Henry Ford, referring to the Model T, reportedly once said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”  That is much like eggs, isn’t it?  Almost all of them are white, though the stores have found ways to upsell anything brown in color.  The one thing that I haven’t seen in the stores yet, however, is a blue/green shade of egg.  Even so, there are breeds of chickens which lay this color naturally.

You will notice four eggs in the picture, the largest of which is a store-bought, large, white egg that I placed in one of the laying boxes to encourage the chickens to lay there.  The other three, however, were all from yesterday.  The one at the 7:00 position in the picture looks identical to the one yesterday in color and size.  The next one going clockwise, at about the 10:00 position, is the first Easter Egger egg.  The next one going clockwise is perhaps a little smaller than the other ones, and it is a little more elongated.  I would say all three are similar in size to a small store-bought egg.

If I understand it right, there are probably three hens laying right now, one of which has layed two days in a row.  I expect all three will now start giving 5-7 eggs a week, or a total of 15-21 eggs a week.  The other seven hens should start laying soon, perhaps more will even lay today.

My family thinks I am a complete dork, but I am so excited about this.

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