Busy girls
29 02 2008
Our ISA Browns and Scots Greys may look a little peculiar at the moment, having been sprayed in a bid to end Wednesday night’s feather pecking frenzy before it becomes a habit, but they’re certainly performing. When I fed them this early morning, I checked the nest boxes and there wasn’t an egg to be seen, although I did get indignant squawks from three hens who didn’t like my peeking and prying.
When I fed the chickens again at the end of the day, I thought I had a good result when I opened the first next box on the big hen house and found 11 eggs. Normally, we’d expect 10 to 12 eggs from the 18 hens currently in here.
Then I found 14 in the next nest box! I double-checked and yes, 18 hens had laid 25 eggs. A few of our Scots Greys have laid twice in one day before, very early and very late in the day, but we’ve never had seven do it. But when I thought about it, I realised we had two of them and five of their offspring in this run so it was probably them. The downside is that they don’t lay for a couple of days before doing a double lay or for a few days after.
When I checked Johnny’s girls in their run, I found the expected result — two eggs from four Scots Grey hens.
Then I checked Orville’s girls and discovered all five of them had laid today. Not bad, when I was expecting two or three from this group of Scots Grey hens.
So there we have it, 32 eggs from 27 hens. Our girls have been busy.
Beautiful looking eggs…
The ISA Brown eggs are the darker brown ones, all the rest are Scots Greys. I love having a bucket of eggs of varying hues. It’s just one of those simple things that’s both appealing and satisfying.
A delicious fresh from the chook egg is something to crow about in my opinion. We currently get them from a friend who has her own chooks and they are just right with some bacon.
I had a similar thing last year after I had erected the new coop and run. The hens stop laying then I started getting extra for a few days.
By the way having only just become compos mentis the violet bums were a bit ‘vivid’ this morning until I realised what is was!
As I am reading this my lovely wife is making spaghetti ala carbonara with some of our girls gifts. With a bit of thick cut bacon. Nothing better on this fine earth.
Wow, thats a lot of eggs. What do you have planned for them?
The Other Half sold 12 half dozens to her work colleagues today, I had egg sandwiches for lunch, she had a couple of fried eggs with her dinner, and we have about a dozen jumbo eggs—too big to fit in cartons— remaining for us to eat. That’s one week’s worth of eggs.
I do get a bit sick of eggs, though, as it’s one of our standbys for when we run short of certain foods. We have a fairly strict fortnightly ration of things like meat and cheese, so eggs tend to get used more as we come to the end of each fortnight, especially as we have to make sure there’s enough non-egg food for the Wee ‘Un.
Hi If you used the gentian violet spray this time , is this because the stinky Ukadex didnt work last year?. We are having plucking problems-so much so one of our chickens had a fist sized hole made in her rear by the other two chickens in a space of half an hour! She had to be put down. But still one is pecking the other so we thought we would have to try the ukadex
I ran out of Ukadex on day two and didn’t want to wait a few days for a new can to arrive. I had a bottle of gentian violet so some of the hens had Ukadex, some gentian violet and the unlucky ones a bit of both.