Jan 23, 2015

Crazy Winter Laying Chicken

In the seasonal world of chicken cycles, usually hens stop laying eggs during the winter. There is a correlation between the shorter hours of light and whether they'll produce or not. Some people work around this natural process by adding lights with timers inside the chicken coop for after the chickens go to bed. This set-up will allow the chickens to lay just about all year. I've always thought it wasn't worth the trade-off of electricity costs and the few amount of chickens I have. I also think if nature does it one way, it's probably best for the chicken to continue that path. Thus I'm always stuck with buying faded yellow yolked eggs from the store during the winter. 
Well for the past two weeks, my leghorn has decided it wanted to surprise me. I noticed that the hen was doing that little "I might lay an egg one of these days squat" when I walked near it. So in the freezing cold nasty weather I started checking. One day I found an egg! It's January and 30 degrees outside! Well... I guess I didn't get it quick enough because it was cracked pretty well. That egg went back to the chickens. But, I have since gotten a pretty steady supply of an egg a day!

This one even has a bit of extra calcium
 Extra calcium deposits are sometimes referred to egg pimples. I go into a bit more detail on another post from a few years ago: Egg Pimples

Isn't nature beautiful?