Chicken-n-Veg

Archive for the ‘Eggs’ Category

We eventually got our first green (or is it blue ?) eggs from our Cotswold Legbars, about a month ago. When we got them towards the end of last Summer we were hoping for them to have started laying soon after. Unfortunately that didn’t happen before Winter set in, at which point we knew that they wouldn’t get any eggs from them until Spring.

All four have now started laying and we are now getting 3-4 coloured eggs every day, which starts to make up for their Winter "freeloading" .

Unfortunately Matilda, one of our ex-battery hens, passed away just before we went on our summer holidays. She had been the top of the pecking order since we got her and had always been a healthy looking hen. Her illness came very quickly. We found her collapsed on the ground one afternoon, in obvious distress, and an immediate visit to the vet was unable to save her.

Additionally, a month or so earlier one of our other hens, Bluebell, had disappeared. We presume she had somehow jumped over the electric fence sometime during the day and wandered off. She never turned up again and there were no sightings by our neighbours. These losses left us with only four hens and one of those was an ex battery who appeared to be enjoying thoroughly enjoying her retirement and laying very few (if any !) eggs. This meant we were getting just two eggs a day, at most. When we returned from our holiday we therefore decided to buy a few more hens.

We ended up buying four point of lay Cotswold Legbar pullets from the local (founder) breeder, Legbars of Broadway. They lay pastel coloured eggs which are predominantly blue (although 15% lay pink or tinted eggs). The Cotswold Legbar was developed at Broadway in the Cotswolds about 20 years ago. Apparently the breed comes from the Cream Legbar, an auto-sexing chicken breed that in turn descended  from three Chilean Aracuna hens bought back from Patagonia in the 1920′s.

Our new hens were about 16 weeks old were already quite striking with their yellow feet, crests and lovely colouring. They had spent the last month or so roaming outdoors in fields surrounded by poultry netting. This meant our garden arrangement, with electric poultry netting protecting a large run was not too much of a shock to them. As advised when we bought them, we kept them physically apart but within sight of our other hens for a week (using a temporary hen house and run). This was to get them used to each other before bringing them all together. It seemed to work very well and we had very little trouble when we did bring them together last week. There were a few minor squabbles as their place at the bottom of the pecking order was established, but we saw no serious bullying by our older hens.

They’ve all been named now – Daisy, Bella, Priscilla and Adam (the name choice of our two and a half year old son !).

We are hoping that they will start laying in the next few weeks and are eagerly waiting for our first coloured eggs

It has been a long while since the last update, but actually there was not too much report during that time. Certainly no gardening and not very much excitement from the hens. The poor things did have to endure weeks of sub zero temperatures and large snow falls just before Christmas. Now that the temperature has warmed up and the days are getting slightly longer they seem happier again and the number of eggs we get has started to get back to normal levels.

We will need to move their run in spring to let the grass in their current one recover a little. They do have a generous 12m x 12m space but it still got very cut up over winter. Topsoil and grass seed will be needed to repair it properly.

I did have one egg related present over Christmas – an Eggbot. This was bought in kit form from Evil Mad Scientist.  It is basically a pen plotter capable of drawing on spherical (ping pong balls, Christmas decorations, etc.) or ellipsoidal (eggs) obects. It is not really an essential item perhaps, but as someone with an electronic background and children I do see it is a fun, educational robot.

The images to be printed are drawn and printed directly from Inkscape, a popular open source (free !) drawing package. The pens used for printing can be any fine tip permanent markers. Inkscape supports layers so by using different layers for different colours and changing the pens during printing, elaborate designs can be created (look at the Eggbot Flikr Group   for photos of designs that more talented people have made). Over Christmas we had great fun decorating and personalising cheap Christmas tree baubles. The picture above shows our Eggbot printing a simple blog based design on one of our eggs and the picture below shows the finished egg.

Flora, one of our two Amber Lee hens has been broody for about 2 weeks. This is apparently not common for a hybrid hen, but she was also our only broody hen last year, when she was only about 28 weeks old. We were unable to break her broody cycle last year and have not had much more success this year. We have tried a number of things as recommended on the hen keeping forums we visit, but she is very persistent. On one of the days we shut her our of the nest box for the whole day. She spent all day pacing around, crowing loudly and as soon as we opened the henhouse up in the evening she jumped straight back onto her "nest" (even though there are no eggs there). Due to the loud crowing (we don’t want to fall out with our neighbours) and its lack of success, we probably won’t try this again.

Her behaviour is certainly disruptive. She fluffs up and starts pecking anything that disturbs her. The other hens have stopped laying in the nest boxes and have made alternative nests in a large Pampas grass plant. The combination of the broody hen and several hens that have started moulting means that we are currently only getting 2-3 eggs a day from our seven hens. Hopefully this picks up soon as we can more than keep up with this paltry (or should that be poultry !) amount.

A couple of days ago we had the first real snow of winter and since then the temperature has hardly crept above freezing. The garden is looking very wintery. I don’t envy the hens though. They had never seen any snow before this week and were not very keen to check it out on the first morning. Last night the temperature dropped below -9 Celsius and actually froze their automatic pop hole so they were shut in till we let them out. We’d better make sure it doesn’t freeze open at night ! I’m impressed by how hardy they are and they are still typically laying 5 eggs per day. They will need to be hardy though, as the sub zero temperatures are forecast to continue for the next week or so.

Last weekend Snowdrop, one of our younger hens and certainly the most friendly and lively, became very withdrawn. She was clearly feeling very poorly and just stood under a tree, away from the other hens, with her head down. She was not interested in any of the food we offered, which was extremely unusual. We checked for all the obvious hen problems but could not find anything (she wasn’t egg bound, had no lice, had a clean vent, no sign of being crop bound, her eyes were clear, no respitory problems, etc.). We managed to get her into our local vets as soon as they opened on Monday. I was very impressed with their service. They seemed very knowlegeable and the consultation and treatment was less than £10.

Apparently Snowdrop’s temperature was "off the scale" and the vet diagnosed an infection of some sort. He put her on a 7 day course of Baytril antibiotics. We had to give this to her twice a day, mixed with some water, using  a small syringe (not easy the first few times !). He also recommended keeping her away from the other hens to limit the chance of cross infection. Additionally, as Baytril is not licensed for hens, he said that we should not consume any of her eggs until at least 10 days after the end of treatment.

Our temporary quarantine solution is to bring her in to the house in the evenings and put her to roost in a carboard box, with a makeshift litter tray and perch. Then in the mornings we place her in quite a large sectioned off area of the run (quite easy to do with moveable electric netting), so she can see the other hens. She doesn’t seem to mind this and after only 5 days of treatment she’s eating and drinking properly again and seems to be back to her normal, lively self.

This weekend we got eight eggs from our eight hens, for the first time, so we can  now be confident that they are all laying. For the last couple of weeks we have typically been getting six eggs a day (and occasionally seven).

I think all, or almost all of our younger hens are now laying. It started off a week ago, with one tiny egg in a nest box (see photo above). In the following days we had a number of soft shelled, broken eggs in the perching area and some more smaller eggs outside the henhouse as well in the nest boxes. By the end of the week, however, they seemed to have got the hang of how and where to lay their eggs. For the last few days we have been getting two or three smaller eggs in the nest boxes, along with the larger eggs laid by our ex-battery farm hens. We haven’t had any soft shelled eggs for at least five days.

When we checked the nest boxes mid morning we found our first egg. It weighed in at 74g. Very Large / Size 1 according to our Good Housekeeping Cook Book. By the end of the day we had two additional (Large / Size 2) eggs. Impressive work by our three ex-battery hens on their first full day. One perfect egg each, laid in the right place. To a commercial egg producer they might be ‘past it’ but they seem fine to us. Boiled eggs for tea – yummy.

We have been planning to get some hens for quite some time (hence the blog name) and spring seems an excellent time to do it. If we get some point of lay hens now they should definitely be providing us with lots of lovely, fresh, free range eggs as we get into summer. A lovely complement to the fresh pickings from the garden. Spinach omlette,….fresh mayonnaise and salad,…..summer fruit meringues,….. mmmmmm.

We are thinking of getting a number point of lay pullets first, hopefully this weekend. Then when these have settled, after a couple of weeks say, getting two or three rescued (ex-battery farm) hens. We have been doing quite a bit of research into suitable hen houses / coops, which will ultimately determine how many we can keep. We have decided to go for a design with an integrated run. There are definitely foxes around at night,and we occasionally see them sunning themselves on our lawn during the day. We intend to let the hens have free reign of the garden whenever we are in the garden. During the times When we are not about, however, we want them to have enough room to stay happy and safe (and for our vegetable beds to stay safe from them !). We also wanted the roosting area to be well off the ground so that vermin would not be tempted to set up home underneath.

We came up with a shortlist of two hen houses we liked the look of and seemed to be consistently well reviewed by others.

• A Boughton 902A Poultry Ark with run extension (suitable for 6-7 hens) from Forsham Cottage Arks
• A Haven Henhouse with extended 9ft run (suitable for 6-8 hens) from Flyte So Fancy

They both seem to be well built, easy to clean, easy to move and reasonably fox proof. We have now decided on the Flyte So Fancy design. This seems to offer a lighter, more airy run. To be honest, however, the main reason is that it is available for instant collection from the companies premises in Dorset. This is only an hour or so away and panders to the impatient “I want it now” part of my character. It means we can pick up and build the henhouse this Saturday and get our hens on the same day !