Farm Fresh Eggs

Our chickens provide us with about a dozen fresh eggs a day.  Even now, in the wintertime!  I love eggs, and I love those chickens!  The chickens run around outside in the cold during the day, and we keep heatlamps in the coop so they can go inside and get warm if they wish.  It seems the five white chickens often can be found inside warming themselves.  They don't seem as tolerant to the cold as the darker-colored birds.  This just an observation of mine.  I assume it's because of the types of chickens they are.  We also keep a light on in the coop during the day, as it can get dark in there because it's not an open air coop.  The light and the heatlamps encourage egg production.

This day was a 10-egg-day.  Not a good egg day! 12 or 13 eggs is a good egg-day!

The two new birds, Luna and Virginia, have integrated into the flock and have started laying eggs in the nest boxes already.  They started laying right away, on the first evening we had them, one of them laid an egg.  They are both Americauna chickens and lay light greenish/blueish eggs.  And their eggs are large!  Many of our other chickens are bantams, so they lay small or medium sized eggs.  Our older chickens, who are older than a year, mostly lay medium and large eggs, and the pullets still lay small eggs and once in a while medium eggs.  As the pullets get older and more mature their eggs will probably be medium/large, too.

This week we got our first dozen eggs that we could label as LARGE.  Most of our cartons are labeled SMALL or MEDIUM.  I was so excited to have a large!  I had to save eggs from two days to have enough eggs to make a large.  But two-day-old eggs are not bad!  I imagine the eggs that other people buy in the store can be several weeks or even months old sometimes!  I have not bought eggs in several years, but I love to look at the eggs in the store.  They are so HUGE and white, it's amazing.  And the brown ones are so dark brown.  Other people in the store must think I'm strange when I stare at the store eggs and make comments about how funny they look!  Most of my chickens' eggs are light brown.

Just in case you don't know, in the US, the sizes of eggs are defined by the weight of a dozen eggs. They are not defined by the size of individual eggs.  Here's a quick chart I got from
http://www.sizes.com/food/chicken_eggs.htm

Size and Weight of a dozen eggs

Jumbo 30 ounces

Extra Large 27 ounces

Large 24 ounces

Medium 21 ounces

Small 18 ounces

Peewee 15 ounces



Light brown and green eggs - LARGE dozen

Now, I'm going to go have some eggs for breakfast!

Happy Saturday!