Tag Archives: eggs

352/365. a counterintuitive observation about backyard chicken flock size and the number of eggs on hand.

352/365. a counterintuitive observation about backyard chicken flock size and the number of eggs on hand.

since we downsized our flock from 8 birds to 4 and got out of the egg distribution business we have way more eggs on hand. before with a market in place, we’d sell or give most of the 56 eggs The Girls produced a week and found we were often short of eggs for our own use. now, without any regular customers – whoooweeee – 4 eggs a day can pile up fast!

in hindsight, 4 hens is the absolutely wrong size flock for us. too few eggs to make it worth the effort to set up regular customers and too many eggs for our weekly needs.

The Girls started laying eggs!

The Girls started laying eggs!

kris went out the coop at the end of the day to check on The Girls and happened to look in the nesting box and discovered they’ve started laying eggs! whooohoooo! fresh eggs!

it seems like just yesterday we were attempting to teach frida to not eat The New Girls.

when i lifted open the lesting box, The Girls were all “oh hey! we didn’t know it did that!”

recipe: bacon and blue cheese breakfast tortillas.

recipe: bacon and blue cheese breakfast tortillas.

so i’m standing, staring at the fridge wondering what i can whip together and a plan slowly comes together. a wonderfully tasty plan. a plan so wonderfully tasty that i can’t believe it had never occurred to me before – BACON AND BLUE CHEESE BREAKFAST TORTILLAS!

i scrambled some fresh eggs from The Girls and started a traditional omelette, then added a bit of cooked and crumbled of organic prairie bacon and organic valley blue cheese and folded it and let it cook for a bit while steaming some sonoma organic, yellow corn tortillas until soft. for a spicy finishing touch, i added a few drops of hot sauce.

i’m not sure the picture does the amazing taste of the bacon and blue cheese breakfast tortilla justice.

it’s definitely going into regular breakfast rotation.

finally, fresh eggs from The (new) Girls!

finally, fresh eggs from The (new) Girls!

some time ago we gave away The Old Girls to a nice farm in the country. after two full years of laying they weren’t producing many eggs anymore and were old enough that they probably wouldn’t have tasted any good on the dinner table. as luck would have it, a local organic pumpkin patch was looking for friendly hens who were used to being handled by children to add to the friendly farm ambiance for their customers. a win-win for old girls!

we wanted to get some new girls that were close to laying age and got a tip that if we hung around the poultry barn at the end of the county fair we could probably pick up some 4H hens after the poultry competitions were over from kids who didn’t want to take their chickens home. so we did! and we did! we got the blue ribbon winning blue-laced wyandotte and an americauna that took second place. later, we bought two year-old black marans to round out the flock.

i haven’t taken many pictures because right after we got them they went into moult, lost a bunch of feather, stopped laying ( this is a perfectly normal seasonal process ) and looked rather pathetic.

but now after about 2 months, they’ve got their feather back and have started laying again! so we’re very, very happy to once again have a supply of super fresh, super tasty and super colorful eggs ( the americauna lays blue eggs, the black marans lay the chocolate brown eggs and the wyandotte lays regular browns ).