New Additions (hens) & Egg Rolls

 A friend of dads has a big chicken farm and they sometimes offer us birds when they have their cull to replace with younger birds. These were from a free ranged chicken farm and are very lively and healthy birds! 

We've increased our flock by 6 birds, and I know these will lay better than our Indian Game over winter, which hardly lay at all when the nights draw in. 

Eggs In The Incubator

 So my two breeding pens of chickens have started laying well it's time to put them to the test! 

The "P" stands for purebreed Indian Game and the "X" stands for crosses where we have an Indian Game Cockerel with Columbian Plymouth Rock Hens. We have just butchered the crosses we hatched out last year so I'm hoping the fertility stays the same. I'll candle these in a week or so. I'm already saving some eggs now for a friend to hatch and and I'm tempted to list some on eBay once I've proven they will hatch! 

Anyone else hatching eggs? I feel I've started late this year! 

Duck Eggs In The Incubator

Using the incubator again! 

The last hatch a friend did at his house. He had runner ducks in there and I had Muscovy in as well. Unfortunately none of my dozen eggs hatched, luckily some of his did so it wasn't a complete failure (for him at least).

So this time I've gone for Aylesbury ducks. I'm hopeful that having some meat ducks will help vary what we produce a bit and if we keep some for breeding we should have some duck eggs.

Not Buying Supermarket Eggs Again!!

If you've read this blog over the 8 years I've been writing it you'll know that in that time I've kept a lot of different chickens (never over 50 though - just encase Defra is reading this!)

And I do normally get some ex-commercial hens each year as my layers. But this year they forgot to ring me!

New Chicks!

I completely forgot to post about the chicks we hatched out the other day! 

These hatched out the Monday last week (17th). A mixture of eggs we got from an extremely lovely couple from Abergavenny who keep and show many breeds of chickens.

Why We Don't Wash Our Eggs

I sell my spare eggs each week, normally to friends in the village, either through playgroup or at the school gate (where I feel strangely like a drug dealer trying to push eggs onto people!).

Egg shaming picture on Facebook - all good fun. 

It's been pretty muddy around here lately with all the rain and the eggs are showing it! I've changed the bedding but it soon gets dirty again. I keep getting digs about how dirty they are, all in good humour (and I give as good as I get) but I keep telling them I can't wash them, they keep coming back so it can't be that bad! 

If you wash them the protective film is washed off as well and then we'd have to store them in the fridge. Apparently most people in the Us store their eggs in the fridge where as over her they're just kept on the side. This article here explains why we don't refrigerate them far better than I could. 

I do remember fridges having egg racks in them years ago but that seems to have gone now. 

Do you keep your eggs in the fridge or on the side?

Do you wash your eggs before sale?

Chicken Clean Out & Sort Out

At the weekend I managed to have a good sort out with the chickens. 

I cleaned all the coops and put fresh bedding in each one. I fixed the one coop by changing the hinges for some much stronger ones.

Wet chickens

I also looked at all the chickens and decide which ones to cull and which ones to keep. 

I've got some hens that have had a year too long as it is and the whole flock starts to look unproductive because of all the old hens I am carrying. The feed starts to cost more than the money I save on the eggs, not only this but because it's so wet more chickens make more mess faster, so having less will be much easier to manage in this wet winter we're having.

I decided that from the one young flock I'm keeping the two new hens that we hatched last year and the cockerels we hatched are still crowing about the place, ready to be eaten on a future Sunday. 

Out of the other pen of 12 birds, I'm keeping the old cockerel and four hens, the other hens are three or four years old now, past their best and time to replace them. I am keeping one of the oldest hens as she is a great broody hen and has hatched out chicks every year, so saves me having to use an incubator. They've now been moved down to the fruit garden for a month or so to let the very muddy pen recover a bit and eat bugs amongst the bushes. 

I'm looking at getting some pure breed birds this year and to start being more selective about which ones I choose to pass on their genetics, generally just keeping chickens but doing it better.

I know that culling hens like this is pretty controversial to some people that read this blog but I make no apologies for posting it here. I need to make sure that these birds pay their way or there is no point in me keeping them. Last year it cost me money to have the chickens here, whereas if I had culled a few more and bought some new hens in I could have been selling the eggs and making enough to cover costs again.

Do you control the number of hens you keep by culling the older birds? How do you manage the stock numbers you keep?

Six Chicks Hatch

I try to hatch a few chicks every year. It's good to grow my own replacement chickens, not to mention the fact that the girls, the wife and me love them!

These ones couldn't have been better timed if I had tried. After a rubbish week we came home and had six little chicks hatch the very next day, the girls thought it was wonderful.

 The six hatched out nine eggs so I was quite pleased, the cockerel is still proving his worth. Yesterday I was talking to a farmers wife that commercially breeds chickens for hatching eggs (we're talking thousands upon thousands here) and she was telling me that as the age of the chickens increase they increase the number of cockerels in the pen to maintain the right level of fertility. Really interesting but it also raised a question for me and that's the fact that we don't often look at the complete life cycle of chickens we buy, these were kept indoors but the hatching eggs that they lay and subsequent chickens could have been for free ranged meat birds. Does that still make them free ranged?

I still have a few more broody hens so I'm tempted to buy some hatching eggs off the internet of a different breed - what's your favourite chicken breed? I'm tempted to go for Light Sussex as I used to have these when I used to hatch some as a teenager.

Hidden Eggs

Some of my chickens have learnt that if they get out I'm not too bothered about putting them back during the day so long as they go back in at night.

But this one has been taking the mickey!

A dozen eggs hidden away right by the side of the house. I walk past it at least four times a day, but they were so well hidden I never saw them!

In the spring I wouldn't mind so much if she came back with a group of chicks but having these eggs left out in the rain is a bit of a waste. Never mind, I'll have to keep a better eye on them from now on! she might be less inclined to go walk about now anyway as I've moved their pen away from all the mud (this did involve me falling straight into the mud whilst I was trying to do it).

Anyone else stumble upon batches of eggs hidden in plane view?

Egg Numbers Improving

Although we're still not getting huge numbers of eggs the numbers do seem to be improving.

Thanks to anyone who left advice when I asked about stopping an egg eater.

Regular egg collection by my wife and two little "helpers" have helped the most I think (and it's not been easy for her in all this mud and wet with two little ones). But I've also made sure there is plenty of extra bedding and added a grit feeder as well as mixing it in their food.

I've not seen any wet, eggy patches in the nest boxes in a long time so, without wanting to use a pun, maybe we've cracked it!

Thanks again for all your help and advice.

Blogging is such a good tool for a homestead! Real advice from people who are living it is hard to beat!

How To Stop An Egg Eater?

My new batch of hens have got everything they could ever want, a nice big coop, a fresh patch of grass, bedding and plenty of food and water.

Why then are they only giving me a few eggs if I'm lucky?

I think I know the answer to this one - egg eater.

I'm pretty sure the eggs are being eaten by a bad hen. The harder question is how to stop it. My wife is going to check and collect the eggs a couple of times a day to lessen the time they're in there. I've added in some ceramic eggs which won't break to fool them into thinking they can't break them and I've added loads of bedding for the nest boxes so the eggs are snuggled down into it.

I'm considering interviewing them one by one, with an egg on the table, and any that go for it will be sentenced without trial (on bin day).

Any other suggestions from fellow chicken keepers before it gets to this?

Broody Hen

Sorry no updates over the last week or so. I've been so busy with work and everything else that I haven't had time. I plan to have a good catch up on blogs sometime soon, so sorry for my lack of comments!

Clucking hen

 And as a follow on from my last post, no sooner had I moved the two silkies out of their arc, another hen went broody. She kept it up for a few days so I decided to separate her off from the others and put some eggs underneath her. The eggs are just from my chickens here, so no pure breeds, but it will be interesting what they turn out like!

Only seven eggs but she's only a small hen

Not a happy hen when I chuck her off her eggs for a drink and a feed for 5 mins a day!

Nearly two weeks in so hopefully my little girl will have some chicks to play with soon.

Altering A Chicken Coop

Last year I made a large chicken coop for some laying hens. It's been great but there is a problem with it.

They won't lay in the nest box. In fact they tend to perch by the nest box and then use it to poo into. Not great if you want clean eggs.
I decided last weekend to alter it. I think the problem was that there wasn't much difference in height between the perches and the nest box. I decided that the best course of action was to drop the nest box lower. Of course this didn't turn out to be as easy as I thought it would be!


The chickens didn't like my first idea for where the nest box should go...

I had to remove the side cladding from the nest box to get at the screws to take the thing off. most of those little bits of cladding then split so I had to find some more wood (their ramp got a little bit shorter if I'm honest). 


Proof in the pudding...

 I also divided up their nest box into four compartments as I'd been  meaning to do this for ages as I think the chickens prefer it and it helps keep their nest clean.


 

Spot the difference?

So if your building a chicken coop make sure the nest box is well below the perch (Mine was 4 inches lower before and this wasn't enough). The first night after I made the alterations all seven chickens were on the perches and there was four eggs in the nest box clean as anything. Job done.

Honesty Box

Not much of an honesty box really. Just an old cool box. 

I thought the footpath that runs across the top of our land might have one good use (for me anyway) - to sell eggs to walkers.

 After a day out there we've finally made a sale! Our first pound from an honesty box!

 Does anyone else use this way of selling surplus produce? Do you have many thefts or things going missing? What else do you sell from it and what do you charge?

Egg colour

My one set of hens contain 5 Legbars and one Welsummer. Or at least I thought it did. One days egg collecting proves otherwise as Legbars lay blue eggs.

Eggs collected from one day



I got these hens from a local smallholding but, as you can see from the picture above, I'm fairly sure there isn't five legbars in that little flock as then I could only have one brown egg in a day (unless that hen has been working overtime).

This is annoying really as I had plans to breed from them, but now they'll only be laying birds as I seriously doubt their lineages and it wouldn't be fair to anyone buying the future hens.

I do want to hatch some chickens this year but I think I'll have to dust off the incubator and buy some fertile eggs off eBay instead. 

Anyone else been sold something thinking it was something else?

Pickled Eggs

We've had a bit of a glut of eggs and with the wet weather a few weeks ago (couple by a lack of nest boxes) the eggs have been a little dirty so I couldn't really sell them. We've been giving them away to friends and family (which has made me popular for brief spells) but we still had quite a few left to do something with.

Boiling eggs

 Pickled eggs was the obvious choice.

So Sunday night I set about boiling them all up (once I'd cleaned the shells and tested that none float) and pickling them in clear vinegar. I had a few large necked jars spare from making chutney and other things involving pickle in the past so I used these, although I've still got to remove the labels.

Eggs pickled. Now what?

Two dozen eggs pickled. The only trouble is I'm not sure I like them. It's been years since I've tried one and I do like vinegar a lot more than I used to (I now eat salt and vinegar crisp which I used to hate) so I'll have to try one in a couple of weeks time. Maybe with a packet of crisps.

If I don't like them I'm sure I won't be short of people to give them to.

First Egg

Although I've kept plenty of chickens in the past it's always great when you get your first egg off your new chickens, and we did on sunday.

Chicken Entertainment Centre

One of our daughters silkie bantams laid the little white egg and although I dont think they will ever earn their keep, at least they're trying!

First egg, a little small though...

Mind you the bantams are worth their weight in gold when they keep our little girl entertained, even if it's for just long enough for my wife to peg out the washing. We call it our Chicken Entertainment Centre and I might try and patent it! Only use if you want your child to turn into a bumpkin though!