We’ve had a couple of decently warm days. Yesterday they were calling for a high of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, but we got to 48. Today we were at least in the high 30s most of the day. The days have been getting longer, and my chickens have been laying more eggs. Their production had dropped way down in December, but it’s gone up now. We were getting 3-5 eggs daily earlier this month, it’s now up to about 7-9 a day.
The chickens decided to venture out today a little. We also cleaned out the coop – it was easier with the warm temperatures. I had tried a couple weeks ago with highs in the 20s and their poop was frozen to the floor, so I just had to add bedding. Today I was able to actually scrape everything out before adding new bedding. Getting the old stuff over to the compost bin wasn’t happening though; we have a huge snowbank in the way, from plowing our driveway. I have the old coop mess over to the side in a bin, and will move it once I can get over there.
I wash eggs on Sundays -we collect through the week and put them in the fridge until we can wash them up all at once. I have noticed my “Escape Artist” chicken is laying again, we’ve had quite a few white eggs this past week. She’s the only white-egg layer.
I’m glad the days are getting longer. I can’t wait for spring.
My tiny u.p. farm 
Do you prefer the brown or white eggs? I think brown eggs have a richer taste.
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I’m not sure I’ve noticed a difference. I love the different colors of the shells though. I would like to get some other shell-color layers in the next couple years – blue, olive, and dark brown. I should try a taste test sometime 🙂
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I think the yolk of the brown eggs have more flavor and are definitely darker in color.
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I hate washing eggs. It’s so time consuming. I wish people that bought our eggs wouldn’t care about them being washed. Any tricks to egg washing efficiency?
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I don’t really have any tricks. It can definitely be a chore. I’m not looking forward to when we get more chickens – it will take awhile to wash. We have a double sink; we fill up one side with water, with a capful of bleach. On the other side we wash each egg individually (usually just a rinse but it depends on how dirty they are). Then pop them into the bleach water while I’m washing the other eggs. The way I do it works well for us, since we find any cracks while washing (those go immediately in the trash). After all the eggs are washed I rinse the bleached eggs before drying on a towel (just because I feel like they should be rinsed. Don’t know if it’s really needed). Supposedly, eggs that are too old will float, so if they are sitting in the bleach water and float, we would know to throw those out. We haven’t had any of those luckily, but we usually have a “when in doubt, throw it out” mentality when finding eggs that are outside of the nest box. If we know for certain there was no egg in that spot last time we were in the coop, we keep it; if we don’t know, then it gets tossed.
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You are right in that washing them does make it easy to spot cracks and bad eggs, I’ll give it that. We too toss them if there are any in question or scramble them up and feed them back to the chickens as a snack!
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That’s a good idea – maybe we’ll try feeding them back to them. I hate wasting them. I did read somewhere that if an egg has a small crack you can still eat it if it’s cooked all the way, but it makes me leery. The chickens would probably not care. 🙂
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