The girls are slowin' down. The girls, meaning the hens. At the peak of the laying year, we were getting about 15 eggs a day. Well beyond our consumption capacity, those eggs find their way to the homes of friends and coworkers. Usually, if a shell cracks a bit during collection, I keep it aside, and we use it the next morning for breakfast, but when we are getting so many eggs, I do tend to discard the cracked ones. If you get too many peppers in the garden, you can dry them, freeze them, make pepper jelly. If you get a huge crop of grapes, you can make juice, grape syrup, or, if ambitious enough, wine. You can make extra milk into yogurt or keep it even longer by making cheese. But, what do you do with excess eggs? Egg jelly, frozen eggs, dried eggs.... yuck. The ancient Chinese apparently preserved their eggs for years, even, by doing things like soaking them in salt and clay. Or, ashes, tea and salt. But, again, yuck. A few centuries back, folks would parboil an egg, coat it in oil and put it in the root cellar. It would "keep" for months, with maybe just a bit of mold. Of course, mold is important for cheese, and I like cheese. But moldy eggs seems like a tough idea to swallow. So, eggs, really seem to best eaten fresh. And, it seems like the season of plenty has past for my little hens. Last year, they were on an egg roll...and laid pretty heavily right through winter. But, as the days have shortened and the temperature has dropped we've started getting a LOT fewer eggs. I look for three or four an evening now.
Now, maybe the fewer daylight hours of nature are not the only thing to blame for our lack of eggs. We started this flock of chickens in the early spring of 2004. That means our eldest hens are a rather mature 7 years of age. This is pretty much past the age when they lay eggs. They might live to be 12, even 15 years old if kept safe and healthy until they're ancient, but the egg laying ship has left the harbor. In fact, commercial laying operations keep hens for 2 years, then off they go to the knackers to feed your dog, or make your McNugget. This is because after the age of 2 it costs more to feed the hen than you can make selling her eggs. We did not raise chicks in 2011. This means the last chick crop here at Cowfeathers was 2010. These are the birds that are still making eggs, with an occasional one here and there from our 3 and 4 year olds. The other 20 birds or so, are just here because we love them. Our eldest ladies, Poppy, Junior, Ebony, Sapphire, Imelda, Pumpkin, Lace...look hale and hearty, no longer pull their weight and are still my favorites. Ebony, a Black Autralorp, is my best singer, and gives me a serenade upon request.
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| The old ladies stick together. All but the Lakenvelder(second from right) are from the original flock. Ebony is the one giving me the tail end view in this shot. All black and vocal. My mother has an elderly Australorp that sings so well, her name is Aretha. |
All our eggs are currently brown. This helps me tell who is laying and who is no longer doing so. We have quite a few Ameraucaunas, and since their eggs are green and blue, not laying. Ditto with our white egg layers. My Cuckoo Marans lay deep chocolate colored eggs...none of those, and no speckled ones either. But, I love the variety of eggs usually in my basket and thus in my carton. So, this spring will need to be a chick spring. Clear out the mudroom and prepare for dust, chick poop and the adorable little peeps and chirps of the fuzzy things. In the meantime, our eggs are precious again. To be savored, not preserved.
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| Cowfeathers chicks. |
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| You can see the thermometer hanging in top left. 95 degrees for their first week of life, then 5 degrees less each week until they are old enough to go out to the barn. |
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| Here they are as 'tweens. On a field trip to the garden to scratch in the warm spring dirt. Evidently they think the grass would be greener... |
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