Friday, September 3, 2010

Our First Homegrown Chicken Egg

We have been waiting so long that we actually were starting to think these chickens weren't going to lay any eggs.

But lo and behold, it happened. My husband was closing the coop a few nights ago and found this little egg on the ground.

We were pleasantly surprised when we opened it to find an egg made of mostly yolk, but the yolk was as big as a full-sized egg's yolk. The other two eggs that we cooked it with were from a local farm, and pastured hens, purchased about two weeks prior. I was shocked at the color difference. The one from our chicken is a much richer orange. It also held together more, which didn't surprise me as much, since I read that you can tell the age of an egg by how firm it is once cracked: the firmer it is, the fresher it is.

So-- these chickens were hatched around the middle of April. That puts them just over 20 weeks old at first lay.  We feed them organic layer pellets and have oyster shell available to them.  They also wander around a portion of the yard during the day, eating bugs and ivy.  We give them all of our table scraps, and take whatever they don't eat into the compost after they scratch in it for a few days.
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