Collecting Eggs

One of my favorite things about raising chickens and collecting their eggs is the variety. Every morning I grab a basket and head out to the coop to see what the girls have left in the nesting boxes.


 It's like Easter everyday! We have 12 hens and most days I get 8-9 eggs.  Every so often I get 11 eggs!
 Even though all our chickens lay brown eggs it's not like purchasing a dozen eggs from the grocery store. I now found grocery store eggs boring.  They taste boring and they look boring to me. 
Here is a picture of just a few of the eggs I currently have in my fridge all laid within the past week-

As you can see, they are all quite different. The first one on the left is a Jumbo size egg.  When we get eggs this big, they always have a double yolk inside.
The second from the left is a large egg, but it's a little on the pointy side.  Third from the left is a large egg and  pretty close to what you see in the grocery store.  Fourth from the left is almost round, darker, and speckled (these are my favorite).
The last one is a cute little round, light colored egg.  This is about the size egg that hens lay when they first start laying and it doesn't quite register on my eggscale

.  I have a feeling that this may have been laid by one of my two older hens, who probably hadn't been laying for the colder winter months,  but has started laying again now that the days are getting longer.
As you can see when you have your own chickens you get a nice variety of eggs every day.  Different breeds lay different size and different color eggs so if you have a lot of different hens in your flock you could have a virtual rainbow of eggs!

Colorful Eggs

Easter is fast approaching and we've been busy coloring eggs.  This is the first year that we've colored brown eggs instead of white.  In the past, when all our eggs came from the store, I would buy the white ones for coloring because they take color the best or so I was lead to believe.  This year with an abundance of eggs there was no way that I was going to buy eggs. We would just have to see what happens when you try to color brown eggs.
Different chicken breeds lay different color eggs-white, brown and even blues and greens.  One thing I have learned while raising chickens is that even though you may have all of the same breed their eggs will not be exactly the same color.  Our chickens are black Australorps, except two, but all are brown egg layers.  We get several shades of brown, some dark, some light but most somewhere in the middle.  Of this variety we chose the lightest brown eggs to color.  Here you can see what they looked like before coloring-

 

 

They came out beautifully!   Orange took the longest to color.  As you can see from the picture above we placed some rubber bands on some.  Also you might notice that the egg is floating.  We blow out our eggs instead of hard boiling them so that we can keep that out on display.  But this also means that you have to keep turning the egg or push it down with a spoon so that it gets colored evenly. An interesting observation in blowing out the fresh eggs, I didn't crack one.  I always break at least one of the store bought eggs, usually more.  Now that I had plenty of eggs to spare not one little crack.  I believe it is because my hens have stronger shelled eggs.  I give them ground up oyster shells for extra calcium, plus they get to free range when the weather is nice and they get leftovers that include fruit, veggies and pasta.

The colors were more earth toned than we would have got with white eggs but we all love the way they turned out!