Melissa's Young Hens Begin To Lay

Since hatching our chickens back in June, if I had a dollar for every time that one of the girls asked when our chickens would start to lay eggs, I could have quite the stash of cash.  As our chickens reached the six month old mark, I started to look for eggs quite often too.  The chickens get to free range each day so Aunt Angie told me to start looking around for eggs in random places.  We looked high and low and still no eggs.

Ella and Henny Penny playing.  Henny looks like she is having lots of fun!

We were getting very impatient, when finally during a very cold spell about a week and half ago, my husband found a pretty blue egg in our chicken coop.  After the first egg was found, the girls had to start taking turns being the egg retriever.  After a week of only finding blue eggs, we were wondering when our other hens would start to lay.  Aunt Angie kept telling me to look for eggs all around.  She suspected that the hens were probably hiding them.  Sure enough, while my husband and I were getting our chicken coop ready for cold weather that was due to move in, we discovered a whole pile of eggs up on some straw bales in our barn.  We were some very excited and proud chicken farmers!

Beautiful eggs from our Olive Egger, Ameraucana, Blue Lace Wyandotte, and French Black Copper Maran.

The weather here in Southern Illinois has been pretty awful this past week with record low temps.  We had to take special precautions to keep our chickens warm.  Lining their coop with extra straw and making sure that the heat lamp was staying on around the clock kept them all warm enough to keep on laying their beautiful eggs.   The girls are pretty sure that our fresh eggs are the tastiest they have ever had!

God Bless
Melissa