I am proud of the Pure Water Hollow hens! They have been doing so well lately, even when I mess up.
Somehow it totally slipped my mind Monday evening to shut up the coop and close their lot. This is dangerous since we have nocturnal predators lurking in the shadows who at times enjoy snatching helpless chickens away from their roost during the night. They drag the defenseless egg-laying ones off to an evil lair of torture and bloodshed and only leave behind a trail of feathers as evidence…
Anyway, enough of the dramatics.
Fortunately nothing came into the coop Monday evening, but that leads us to the next potentially negative consequence of leaving the lot open. When I went to feed them yesterday morning, they were already spread out over the yard, which meant they would free-range the entire day!
We only let them out in the evenings for a few reasons, generally. For one we don’t enjoy the accumulated messes that they can leave all over the yard when they are out all day every day. It also seems that they can get into more mischief when they have all day to themselves, whether it be in the strawberry bed or picking at styrofoam insulation waiting to be used!
Secondly, if they get tired of our yard, they can roam a pretty far distance away out to the highway or over to the neighbors yard or across the hill. None of these places are as safe as staying close to home. (The only negative of them being out all day was that two of them did not come back to the coop last night and we could not find them anywhere. I hope they are OK and will show up today.)
Another reason to leave them penned up most of the day is to help them be near the nest boxes when they want to lay their eggs. When they wander far away, they may lay their eggs anywhere and then we would not have the benefit from them. I think they could easily get in the habit of laying eggs somewhere other than the coop, and that would be bad!
Well, they were out all day but they still came back to the coop, for the most part, to lay their eggs. I was afraid we would only have a few eggs in the nest boxes, but by the end of the day they had given us 13 eggs in the coop! We had gotten 14 yesterday and 15 the day before, so it seems that we did not loose many eggs by letting them free range all day.
I am also proud of them for laying so many eggs in general, lately, even though we have been having some nasty weather. We had 6 straight nights below freezing and the days have been mostly cloudy and only in the 40s. After a while of yucky weather it usually seems that the chickens get bummed out and stop laying so well. They are doing good with it so far and now the weather should turn a bit nicer, even though it is raining today.
Speaking of numbers of eggs, we saw our weekly egg record get broken again last week! The first week of April they laid 91 eggs, breaking the record they set the previous week of 85 eggs. Actually, 4 of the last 6 weeks have been record breaking weeks for our egg production! You go, girls! It is possible that the 91 record will fall this week, if we can keep up the average of these first three days of 14.
Maybe I’m getting into this more than I should, but I have been enjoying our chickens. By the way, we are finding people who want to buy our eggs, even though we haven’t really started trying, yet. I think we have made over 12 dollars this month selling eggs so far, but I don’t have the calendar in front of me for the exact number. I know we have already covered the cost of their feed and we still have more eggs than we can eat. We are going to order some egg cartons so we can offer them to some of the local stores around here. It would be nice if we could find an easy way like that to sell quantities of our eggs.
That’s about all I wanted to say at this time about our chickens. If they could read, they would know how proud I am of them!
3 comments
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MrsBurns on April 11, 2007 at 11:15 am
What is the going rate for a dozen eggs? Mine are still about 4 months from laying at all (being just a month old) so I am looking forward to experiencing what you have going!
MrsBurns
Reply from Purewater:
Well, we are not very good in the marketing and sales department. So far we have just let people sort of name their own price. Most people want to give us at least $1.00 for a dozen but some have given between $2.00 and $3.00. One lady who is used to buying the expensive, organic, vegetarian fed chicken eggs told us that ours were much better tasting so she wants to pay closer to what she was giving at the store. I think she gave us $10.00 for 4 dozen.
Edited by Purewater on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 12:25 PM
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The Unlikely Homesteader on April 11, 2007 at 1:36 pm
We're really enjoying our chickens too. We are letting them free range during the day and we've got such a kick out of watching them all herd themselves into the coop at night. We just go out there and shut the door and lock it.
We're having a great spring rain right now and they all went back into the coop, but they're sitting close to the door…watching to see when the rain stops. Too cute. I bet there will be lots of yummy worms for them then!
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guest on April 24, 2007 at 9:25 am
Reading your account of the chicken adventures reminds me of my mother ordering baby chicks by mail (this was in the late 1940's). They came to the post office at River in a box with air holes cut into the sides of the box. When we got the box home and opened it up a flood of yellow feather scrambled out of the box and spread over our kitchen floor. We sometimes kept them in a crate near the Heatalator until it was warm enough outside to introduce them to our existing flock. Judy Meek Harwood
***Purewater writes:
Thanks for visiting the blog, Judy! I am glad you are enjoying it.
I would imagine that many, many chickens have grazed the land at Pure Water Hollow down through the years. A few people around here still raise chickens, but I'm sure it is not as many as it was in the 1940s!
Most people today have no desire to bother with chickens, unless they want to fight them, but we are really enjoying caring for ours. We are finding them to be a great benefit to our homestead.
Edited by Purewater on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 10:35 AM
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