No Such Thing as a Standard Egg??

When it comes to our chooks it seems like there is no such thing as a standard size egg.

Our baby chicks are laying little eggs and our big chooks have the whole size range covered.

That big one is 127grams!!!  Some poor chook must be a little sore tonight.  The one on the left (as you look at the pic) is a standard 60gram egg.

It's lucky we aren't a professional egg farm, our sorters would be having all kinds of problems.

Can't wait to see how many yokes are in that big one.  We often get 2 but I'm sure this will be more.  Stay tuned.

Our First 1/2 Dozen

Yesterday we got our first 1/2 dozen eggs in one day.  We've have had Polly, Penny and Prue for over a year now and recently introduced Suzi Q, Sybil and Sabrina. 

Sabrina, Suzi Q and Sybil

We bought them all when they were just a few days old and hand reared them.  This is a fun exercise and we prefer it to buying "point of lay" chooks although it can be a bit challenging intergrating them with the existing flock.


3 Big 3 Small

These little ones lived in a house below the big chook house until they were big enough to climb the ramp to the "big house".  That's when the big chooks decided they didn't want to share the house.  It only took a few days for the little chooks to realise if they got in before the big chooks did they could move to the back of the house and bed down for the night. 

Now that they are laying eggs I'm sure they will be better accepted by the bigger chooks.
 

Sunday Morning

I love the mornings and am so glad that I was born a morning person !   I have a lot of work on outside of my normal work at the moment so that means I need to spend a fair amount of time in my office on the weekends.  That's not hard, this is the view from my office window.








Before I start work in the mornings I go for a walk around the gardens and see what has happened over night.   This is a pumpkin I hand pollinated yesterday morning and hopefully it did the trick and will grow.  If we don't hand pollinate our pumpkins we don't get any.  I need to plant flowers to attract the bees.

Lilly sees me with the camera in my hand and sits in front of me in her best pose.

Layla and Lilly both come up to say Good Morning to the chooks.

On My Mind...................

This post is part of a Friday photo feature called "On My Mind" over at the Down to Earth Blog. 

http://down---to---earth.blogspot.com/


A few months back I received some day old chicks for my birthday.  This week one of them produced their first egg.  I wasn't there to see it so Garry took these very cute photos for me.  The little egg  measured35mm end to end.

Have a great Friday !

What Really Came First - The Chickens or the House?

I called my first blog post – The First Step and it was about building our house.  The truth is the first step was building the chicken coop.  I was so eager to have chickens that we built our chicken coop and bought our first layers before our house was built.  We spent many hours researching chickens and chicken coops on the internet and it’s fair to say we started this exercise from scratch with very little knowledge.

Garry designed and built two boxes for the chickens to roost in.  We then got started on building the chicken run.  For me it was important that they had plenty of space to free range.   We got our first layers a couple of days before Easter and our first egg on Easter Sunday.    We spent many hours just hanging around in the chicken coop watching and learning about what chickens do and after a few weeks we would let them out of the coop each day to roam free around the property but if we were outside they preferred to be with us.

They were very happy chickens but unfortunately we weren’t aware of just how smart foxes could be.  One night we lost 2 chickens to a fox who managed to scale the chicken run fence.   This was heartbreaking  for us and I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

We did some more research and ended up buying two mesh cages that we have joined together.  We attached the nesting boxes to the sides and can still retrieve the eggs without having to enter the cage.  The chooks put themselves to bed at night and we go up later and close the cage door.    The cage is completely enclosed so they are now safe not just from foxes but snakes as well.

At the moment we have 9 very happy healthy chickens who supply us with amazing eggs each day