Tuesday 10 June 2008

Chickens and eggs


Our two chickens are enjoying the bright summer weather. The lawn which they almost destroyed during the wet winter months has recovered so they once again have plenty of grass to eat. With the long summer days they now spend up to fourteen hours a days just wandering around the garden eating- seems like a nice life!


They are quiet most of the time but there is quite a bit of fairly loud clucking at egg laying time. Recently, a rather bleary eyed teenager came downstairs complaining that the chickens were really loud that particular morning and had woken him up. Chickens do get up much earlier than teenagers but then most living things get up earlier than teenagers!


I joked that perhaps the noise was loud because they had laid a really big egg. When I collected the eggs, I found this

a huge egg.
It is longer than the width of my hand, I'm not surprised there was a lot of clucking.
We have now had the chickens for almost a year. My husband has been writing down the price of the feed, grain, straw etc we have bought in that time and yesterday he worked out that our eggs cost us around 70p a half dozen. I realised I no longer know the price of eggs because I haven't bought any but for free range organic eggs (we buy organic layer pellets ) that must be well under half price.
So two of the advantages of keeping chickens, reasonably priced eggs and a method of waking teenagers!

3 comments:

BurdockBoy said...

Wow that egg came from a chicken-it's like duck size.

Heather L. said...

70p is definately a good price, at least for over here in AMerica where we are currently paying $4.00/dozen for free range eggs (that being the low end). I guess that egg deserved a bunch of clucking. :)

One Woman's Journey - a journal being written from Woodhaven - her cottage in the woods. said...

I miss my chickens
When I lived in the country I had them.
I loved watching them and the rooster crowing in the morning made me smile.
We had 8 hens. My daughter at that time was 8 and she named each one.
I still have the sheet of paper where she did this. We had a game rooster and she named him "Long John"
That daughter is now in her 30's and has my delightful 2 littles ones that are 3 and 5.
Memories