Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Eggs! And an innocent walk to the garden.

First six of the day
So the day has finally come!  Today we got eggs from more than 50% of our 13 hen laying flock.

We've been getting 3-4 brown eggs a day for a couple of weeks.  We're pretty sure the Red Stars were the first to lay.  We think one of the Buff Orpingtons is laying, and today we got 4 Easter Egger eggs and 5 brown eggs.  Six were found in four different laying boxes around noon by daughter #2, who delights in beating her Mom to the eggs.  Later one more EE egg was found in on the floor of the coop, another EE egg was found in a box, and a yet another was found under the Chicken Veranda. We have 3 EEs, so one is likely a day old or so.


One on the coop floor.

This brings up an interesting thing.  When we first talked about getting chickens, the deal was they would be mine to look after and take care of.  I've posted before that De has adopted the layers.  They are essentially hers now.  She knows it and, oddly enough, the birds know it.  The interesting thing is that K (daughter #2) is now getting in on the act.  She comes home on break from the Daycare Ministry where she works around noon, and rushes to the nesting boxes to collect the eggs.  If De doesn't beat her to it, she checks later in the day, too.  K says "It's like Christmas!" By the way, if an egg isn't nicely 'deviled', K doesn't eat it.  Odd...

 


As I said, the birds know who there primary 'owner' is.  We were giving the birds a supervised outing and several hopped up in De's lap to say 'Hi', expecting to be rewarded for their politeness with a little scratch.  The shop paper towel is there 'cause one of them did something decidedly impolite a little earlier.

Finally, while D and K were watching the girls,  I decided to go see if any of that sweet corn I was expecting to be a total loss was going to do anything at all.  It's clear I'm a poor judge of what constitutes a "total loss".

I think that's about 3 dozen ears.  There will be about that much more ready by Saturday, and probably another 5 - 6 dozen a few days after that.  Obviously, if you're in the garden you have to check the whole thing, thus the yellow squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers.  I didn't find any zucchini, but you know it's there.  The whole time I had an audible 'image' of the deep, maniacal chuckle of some hidden zucchini with aspirations of getting big enough to take on Zyla the dog and win 2 out of 3 rounds.

Anyway, once again we were blessed where we thought there would be nothing.  God is so faithful!  There will be plenty of sweet corn this year.  Oh, and eggs too.

Col. 1:9-14,

Mark

3 comments:

  1. Love your gardening "basket" . . . also known as a wheelbarrow! Anyone who has to gather their garden produce in a wheelbarrow is doing just fine in the production department. Pretty soon I suppose you'll be collecting eggs with a front loader. ;o)

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  2. Mama Pea - We are doing ok this year despite our slow start. This is the first year I've had to roll the wheelbarrow into the dining room to get the produce in where it can be processed. It's one of those things that just looks wrong and takes awhile to get your head around it.

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