Eggs!

In mid-September we bought some chooks. to live in our chook house and hopefully produce some eggs for us to eat. They were too young to lay back then - they were around 15 weeks old. The man who sold them to us said they should start laying around 20-21 weeks which would have made it a race to see whether Miranda or the chooks laid first. Others have since told us that 25 weeks is more normal. Otto is six weeks old this week so Miranda won hands down.

The chooks' behaviour started to change over the last week or so and we thought it must be nearly time. So we'd been checking the chook house but also in their favourite places around the yard as we'd heard lots of stories of people thinking the egg count was down then finding a stash of a dozen eggs under the mulberry tree. A few days ago there were some not very well formed eggs in the chook house - they may have been the first attempt. Yesterday I went for an expedition under the camellias and through the red currants but without any luck. Then Miranda checked in the prickly berries at the back of their run where she'd seen the brown chook hanging out a few times. We were very excited to find that there were two eggs there. They look just like real eggs!

 

 

 The chooks are so clever they even managed to put dates on them ;)

The two eggs together weighed 100g so they're a bit smaller than your standard supermarket egg.  But they are mainly made from our kitchen scraps and any seeds/fruit/bugs that the chooks can find in our garden (plus some pellets). The eggs are now in our fridge waiting to be consumed.

You may also have noticed that we bought three chooks but there are only two in recent posts. Don't know exactly what happened to the poor chook - it was sick one day, then looked a bit better that afternoon but the next day was no longer with us when I got home from work. I buried her - the roses next to the damson plum are now looking particularly lush.