Yesterday I began a new page with the egg counts. See it here .
It’s a work in progress. The first page is a list of all pages with counts, and I have them named by month, so all egg counts are on monthly grouped pages, with the format, currently, similar to how I put the egg counts in this weblog as posts, in the dotted border box … but all formatting will be changed sooner than later probably, as I put in more data and see how better to arrange it.
So as it goes, I only have one page listed right now, this current month, and only the past week or so of counts. Once I get more formatting decided then I’ll add more data.
Thanks to WP 1.5 for this functionality using “Pages” 🙂
The current months link will also be on the side bar. Find the basic egg report link on the headers right navigation menu too.
3 responses to “Egg Counts moved to own page”
How come my eggs don’t look like that? Yours are so, so…clean! 🙂
Well, it takes both people and hens to get them clean.
People must give hens a nice place to lay their eggs and keep clean hay/straw in place. Some hens like to kick it out, so must have a box they can’t or don’t want to do that in.
Secondly, provide hens with a nice place to roost. If they have that, they won’t sleep in the nest area usually.
That is what makes most eggs so very dirty, poop in nesting area.
The next level is to “check for eggs and develop a pattern for checking so as to get most of them while still warm.
If there is anything on the eggs, use a paper towel, dampen one portion and gently rub the dirt off of the egg, only where there is dirt.
Most of the time the eggs aren’t dirty at all.
After a rain storm time they might be dirtier due to mud issues we usually have. So it’s just a matter of getting the eggs faster and cleaning them up fast before dirt sets stains. Eggs are porous so the dirty stains really stain the longer they are there. Bloom comes off of eggs if they are cleaned off, but mostly if you prepare the laying area well in advanced and vigilantly (not slavishly) watch for egg laying times, and more hay needs — you’ll have eggs that are easy to tiny spot clean or not clean at all.
I’m so happy when my hens lay it’s not hard to go outside and see if there are eggs many times a day. A short walk in the backyard enjoying God’s creation calls to me on most days! 🙂
We do have issues in one of our pens now with dirtier eggs, it’s a shelf nesting area and I can’t keep hay in it for more than an hour. Hennies kick it all out.
So I need to get a facing board on the area and only have a round hole for them to get in it so it’s more cosy and they keep the hay inside. But even there, where there is usually chicken poop, most eggs are clean when I get them. Just one little spot touches the floor, so if there is something there, a small dab with a damp paper towel gets that off.
It’s rainy days that have eggs out there longer that make them cruddy. Hard rains aren’t times to go out, our ground is saturated the last year or so, and it’s splish splash slip slide to walk in the yard. Imagine then that the hens have issues with mud too, as good as they are at pecking the ground, eating grass, moving grass away for a good dirt/dust bath, rain makes that into instant mud. Yuck.
That’s my newer A-Frame pen.
My other hens are in the SuperYard (baby/toddler gate system) that I’ve used for hens with roofing material on it. I have a cardboard box (Crystal Springs mountain water box, that holds 6 1-gallon jugs, it’s super strong and rightly proportioned for this task) suspended on the side of the pen, held with bungee cords. The box has two top flaps that don’t meet in the middle. Using the box when it’s new it has water jugs in it, and I just open up one of the flaps. That leaves one flap secured down with strong glue from the factory. That is what is the front edge of the nest box. That keeps the hay and eggs and hens inside.
So the top of the box becomes the side of the box, the enterance hole is the flap that was opened. It just sits there flippy flap opened.
On the side of the box, which is now the top, I cut open a egg collection flap, a three sided cut with a sharp knife. Bungee cords grab onto each side where there are handle cutouts from the factory, then I stretch them outside through the Superyard holes and position them where they hold the box tight. It’s something that costs nothing, and is replaceable easily with a new box.
IF I ever painted a box, I could keep the same box in use longer. As it is, I go through two or three in a year at most. Most cases for having to replace them is too much rain, box saturates and can’t dry out before more rain, then it starts to come apart, but still lasts months longer if it just has a chance to dry out instead of staying wet. 🙂 Painting the box is my hope to do in the future.
I would use such a box in the A-Frame, and that would give me cleaner eggs in there all the time with good clean hay, if I had a place to hang it. Currently I can’t. The SuperYard is super modular because of it’s wholly structure, broom sticks fit through the holes to make roosts and other things can hang on the sides. The A-Frame is constructed from wood with angles and so it’s not so easy to adapt something so fast.
Those egg pictures are from last year and the year before. All of them came from the water box nest system. They were all cleaner all the time by far.
Sometimes a hen lays an egg in the grass. Not clean grass. That’s yucky. That a “bath needing egg”. For them it’s easiest to put the egg in a bowl of water for a mintute, than gently wipe it off with a damp paper towel, use a clean damp paper towel at the end to finish up the polishing.
In my short years of hennie pennie fresh eggs I’ve never refridgerated any, and they keep fine in the kitchen. I’ve had a backlog of three or four week old eggs, and they are always fine, I’ve found. I had only ONE egg that was icky inside — and that one was suspect since it has a hairline fracture in it.
So if you have cracked eggs that you get, if they aren’t leaking, just use them soon. If they are leaking use them right away or give that one to dog or cat or pig, what-have-you. Don’t save those eggs, use them the same day or next if you can. As long as the membrane is instact they are alright to use sooner than later, just within a few days is what I prefer. I scale all mine by how old my inventory is, and which I need to use first, cracked egg from yesterday, or my oldest eggs … which is weighted as more important is task to determine.
I hope that’s some help to you! It’s more than you asked, I know 😉
Expert that I am ;-), I second the hay/straw and roost. Yesterday, our eggs were perfectly clean – not a smidgen of anything to clean off. Dh had cleaned the pen for me the night before. 😉 It had gotten pretty “ripe” and we definitely had dirty eggs because there just wasn’t clean straw left anywhere and most, if not all, had been kicked out of the carrier. So, now, I have pretty eggs again! Hooray for dh! 🙂 He noticed a difference immediately and that rewarded him for his work in a tangible way…because with the car parked in the garage and the angle of the pen, I’m too large to manage getting the eggs out now and I have to wait for agile long armed him to get home! 😉 He likes grabbing clean eggs for me rather than dirty. 🙂 I think I just about have him talkied into more chickies soon…the current girls are doing their part though. I commented how much I liked our hens last night and he said, “I like them too. They’re nice chickens.” That’s lavish praise coming from him. My husbands not yet a “farmer” either Maisy…but he’s coming around. 😉
Ramble, ramble! Better get movin’ to my daily tasks… Fun chicken talkin’ with ya! 🙂