Yesterday we had a five egg day. We have had several five egg days this year but we had eight girls up until now. What makes this five egg day special is that it is five eggs from six girls. That is pretty impressive!
When we have omelette for dinner I use five of our little eggs. At the beginning of the season it took about three weeks to collect enough, we were eating some eggs for breakfast at weekends and a couple of days in the week.
Now one day’s eggs can make an omelette. When keeping chickens eggs are a bonus but they are a very lovely bonus.
I now have an even split of three girls laying brown eggs and three girls laying white eggs. They are not really brown, that’s just how I think of them, they are beige. The white ones are pure white though so there is a difference.
Peaches, Barley and Speckles lay the white eggs and Toffee, Emerald and Butterscotch lay the beige eggs. Below, the white eggs are the two on the left. The first one is Peaches and the second large one is Speckles.
A five egg day
Of the white eggs Speckles eggs are really big, Peaches are medium and Barley’s are small. Only Barley didn’t lay yesterday.
Five eggs from six girls
The colour doesn’t show up much on a photograph but it’s enough for me to easily tell them apart.
The odd thing is that research says that game birds don’t lay well and neither do goldtops (my biege egg girls) because they go broody regularly but leghorns and anconas (my white egg girls) are good layers.
In my flock my beige laying girls lay the best. The game birds do have a shorter season than the rest of the girls, they start a bit later and stop laying about a month earlier, but while they lay they lay almost every day. Toffee recently laid six days in a row missed a day and started again.
Butterscotch does go broody but lays almost every day in between. Peaches, Barley and Speckles only lay two or three times a week. It will be interesting to compare the tally at the end of the year.
I love watching the patterns that emerge with their egg laying and always feel so proud of them with every egg laid. The pleasure never wears off. I am really enjoying their lovely eggs at this abundant time of year.
Click here to see the history of my flock.
That’s a really great return and much better, proportionally, than mine. I have 2 broody and another 2 thinking about it – whilst there is no shortage of nest boxes, they all want the two favourite ones, meaning there was one egg laid in the run today and another on the floor of the hen house. Fortunately, the shells are robust from most of them, except for my 2 welsummers, who are now old ladies and producing at best a couple of eggs per week, with poor shells and a distinct loss of pigment from last year, when they were still producing lovely dark brown eggs. It’s odd how some, like Speckles, produce eggs far bigger than you’d expect for their diminutive size.
Butterscotch usually lays for three weeks then goes broody but this time she has been laying for four weeks. I think perhaps as she is getting her feathers back in after her last spell of moulting this has slowed everything. She isn’t laying every day but isn’t going broody either so that is a good thing.
It is amazing how such a little girl like Speckles can lay such big eggs.
Emerald has twice laid in the chicken shed/coop. You never know what they are going to do next.