August 18, 2011 by Amanda

Blame it on…

Blame Teresa and her ridiculously cute new babies. Blame our friends who are looking to add a few new gals, blame me for coming up with the idea, but no matter who you blame we’ve got another crazy project going on ’round here!!

We’ve had a Broody hen for oh, about 2 months. This is the second time she’s gone broody. Typically we steal the eggs out from under her each night, but when a friend mentioned wanting to add chickens to their current flock I said lets see if our hen will hatch them for us.

Now our broody hen is sitting on a nice little clutch of fertile eggs (unlike ours) and we’re playing the waiting game. 20 days (from today) we will hopefully see some baby chicks. After the babies hatch we’d like to let the hen mother them for a bit and then the new birds will move toour friends home. Hopefully all goes well. Pictures and details to come, but for now we’ve been to busy to get to that!

June 21, 2011 by Amanda

What do we do with all of our eggs?

We typically get 17-22 eggs each day from our chickens. Obviously, unless we were planning to eat eggs for every meal, everyday, we have extras. Quite a few extras actually. Although we do consume 1-2 dozens of eggs ourselves, weekly, we have to find a home for the rest of the eggs. What good is raising food if all you plan to do is waste it?

First and foremost we share our eggs with our families. We give eggs to our families whenever they need them. We supply 6 households within our families with fresh eggs.

Still though, we have a lot of eggs. I developed a system at work to sell the excess eggs. I have a sign up list at my desk at work. When people need eggs they sign up on the list and I bring in the eggs the next morning. The system works well. For $2 a dozen, the people I work with can purchase farm fresh eggs without having to make any special trips. I have consistently added customers through word of mouth. We’ve had rave reviews, something that encourages new employees to give them a try. After people try a dozen, they are typically hooked! The fact that we help so many households eat locally is very rewarding!

All the money that we make selling eggs is stored away and saved for future chicken purposes. Right now we are saving up to build a new chicken coop. We would like to raise more chickens and hope to build a new coop that will house ~100 birds. Then we will have two coops to help raise new chicks and future meat birds. Exciting stuff!!

Where do you buy your eggs?