Chickens and Easter Eggs

There's lots of news down on the "farm!"  Too much to write in detail about all that's been going on in terms of the garden and chickens.  But I have planted some seeds in the ground, have eaten my first of many salads (please someone come help me eat these greens!), and have played the "just kidding" game with Jack Frost.  (For those who don't know this one: This is the game where you think he's left town for the season,  so you put your hoop house in the shed, plant all sorts of stuff that's not supposed to be planted until after the last frost, and then out of the blue one day, he screams, "JUST KIDDING!" and you're scrambling to get the old sheets and the hoop house out of the shed to cover EVERYTHING.  I'm only a little bitter this year thanks to the hoop house!

Greens in full force.  (The white stuff is to try to keep the slugs off the new plants coming in.)

Other side of the bed from the greens.  New lettuce seedlings.

Garlic coming in up top of the other bed.  Should get about fifty heads in July.  No problem with vampires around here.

Haven't put anything here yet.  Waiting for peppers, tomatoes, and other things that like hotter weather.

The best news though, is that during my break from blogging, our chickens began to lay!  Conveniently, we got our first egg on March 1st, a full two to three weeks earlier than I anticipated.  I was not shocked, though, that our first egg was white.  I included the Leghorn breed (the all-white with red combs) in our flock because they are known for their lay rate and their great "feed conversion ratio," meaning they don't eat much but they lay a lot of eggs for how little they eat.  One of our Leghorns is also laying HUGE eggs.  They are consistently double-yolkers and one, which really looked like an ostrich egg, was a triple-yolker.  Fertile Myrtle!

The ostrich triple yolker.  I didn't want to eat it, but it wouldn't fit in a carton!

It has been amazing watching the whole flock "come into lay" as the number of hours of daylight increases. (Did you know that lay rates are based on how much light the chickens get?  During the winter we will get fewer eggs.)  The Auracanas started laying their blue-ish eggs next, and slowly the two brown(ish) layers revved up at the end of the month, after lots of shell-less eggs dropped under the roost bars.  I can't believe how many eggs we are getting.  Some days we get six, some days seven, and today we got NINE!  There's a lot of quiches in our life right now, and I can't wait to make some homemade mayonnaise and have the luxury of baking with my own eggs.

Our March egg count: 115 eggs. 

Leghorns: 60

Auracanas: 35

Silver Laced Wyandottes: 13

Speckled Sussex: 7

The very first egg.

 

Today's "harvest."

 And the last piece of farm news---ALL the chickens finally have names.  It took a while until they were fully grown, with fully developed combs and feathers, to decide on names and to tell some of them apart, especially the three Leghorns.  We are also starting to see how some of them are different in personality.  Cocoa is the sweetie who loves me even though I think she's the one whose leg I crushed under the coop wheel.  We bonded after her incident because I was giving her treats out of sheer guilt.  Now she thinks I am treat lady, which I am, and is the most willing to sit in my lap.  She's also been voted "Most Likely To Wander From the Pack and Become Hawk Bait."  She's really stupid.  Big Red, originally given that name because she was the first Leghorn to develop her large red comb, is the most precocious of the bunch...the first to come over and see what you're up to.  And "Floppy" (whom I prefer to call "Flopsy")...well, it's kinda obvious why she got her name.  And she's constantly brushing and shaking that thing out of her face.  The little debutant.

Floppy.

On the nicer days, we let the ladies out to dust bathe in the mulch.  Clockwise from the top: Double Stuff, Elizabeth, Oreo (Double Stuff's slightly-more-black sister), Penny (aka: Reed), and Henny.

This is half of the nesting pair of hawks we have in our front trees.  They were much easier to spot before the leaves came in on the trees.  I think they remember the chicken dinners from last year and came back thinking they were going to feed their babies.  

I still love my coop.  Probably more and more each day.  I've been moving it around 2 or 3 times a day now that the girls are bigger and pooping more.  It's the best thing ever.  Really.  I'd give up my iPad before I'd give up this coop.   And the hawk babies will be hungry.