I’ve been a bit delinquent in posting about our backyard chickens!
It’s been 8 whole weeks since our first hen began laying and our hold-out hen started laying on the 4th of July.
We are getting 3-4 eggs a day at this point – enough that we’ve started bartering with friends for homemade bread, etc. It’s magical I tell you – having fresh eggs. This last weekend the variation in colors blew me away, it was practically a rainbow of eggs!
It’s been almost a week since our first hen began laying. We’ve had six beautiful blue eggs from her and yesterday our sliver laced wyandotte layed her first egg! I snapped a quick pic with the two laying hens and each of their first eggs.
The eggs are still a little on the small side, but I’ve already seen an increase in size from our ameraucana over the last week. It’s quite a delight to watch the hens settle into the nest to lay the eggs, adjusting the nesting material to suit their needs.
I’m a little surprised our buff orpington isn’t laying, as she’s the oldest in the flock by two weeks. She’s not showing any signs of laying anytime soon either. Maybe she’s just a bit of a late bloomer?
And this time she layed it in the nest box next to the blown glass eggs my grandmother gave me. My great-grandmother used them with her chickens in the 1920s and my grandmother saved them all this time. How cool is that?
And it’s beautifully blue! Now if only she can make it to the nest box next time…
Edited to add: a farm fresh brown egg for size comparison (below).
Coloradoans have a saying: “Don’t like the weather? Wait 10 minutes.”
This spring has reminded me of the truth in this idiom. In the last 11 days we’ve had ~30 inches of snow, temperatures as low as 16 overnight, and temperatures during the day as high as the 60s. I love it. The chickies, however, do not. They’ve been stir crazy in the coop. Thankfully, the sun came out today, the snow is melting, and they were able to play in their run like the little chickens that they are.
Overtly Optimistic 