Eggs!

After suffering no eggs for several weeks, the new girls have started laying, but they're not laying in the nesting boxes so much.  They seem to prefer the hay storage in the cow shed.  They get into the straw, dig themselves a little nest and share it amongst themselves.  They've got three nests going.

At first this bothered me, but now I've changed my mind. The coop is pretty full with each nesting box often sleeping 2-3 chickens.  That night time occupation yields a fair amount of chicken poop.  The nesting box straw has gotten pretty icky.  The eggs laid in this nice clean straw are much cleaner. 

My ten year old twins are goofy for the chickens.  They love climbing around in the shed looking for eggs and they love hugging their chickens.  With so much holding, the chickens seems to enjoy the hugs too.  Here is our White Crested Polish rooster, Meryfeather.

We looked forward to the chickens cleaning up the cow pies when we let them into the pasture.  While milking this morning, we watched a group of chickens descend into a still-steaming cow pie.  They scratched through it, pecked at it, and within ten minutes, it was gone.  It's a little gross but the chickens seem content.

We got through our egg desert with ground flax seed as an egg substitute, but it's nice to have egg abundance again.  My children love nothing better than scrambled eggs for breakfast.  It's pretty easy to tell which of these eggs were laid in the clean straw and which weren't.

Last winter with our 14 hens we got 0-2 eggs each day.  This winter we have more hens and they are younger.  Yesterday we got ten eggs.  Chickens lay based on day length and we are at the lowest day length of the entire year right now.  I'm remembering our egg production going from two a day up to ten a day when the day lengthened.  If we follow that pattern we'll be getting 40+ eggs per day this summer.  Hmmm...... we might be selling eggs.