The Chicken Diaries #3

For someone who has been used to the graded supermarket eggs, it did come as a surprise to me that four chickens of the same age and breed, sourced from the same farm and now living together in the same environment could produce eggs of such inconsistent size.

I actually love getting my big eggs and little eggs. They are useful for different purposes.

As well as inconsistencies in size, the number of eggs we get each day varies. Whenever we get a day when all four hens lay, it is a cause for celebration (often in the form of a fried egg sandwich). For a while, we thought that none of them were laying. I was worried that they were somehow not happy. Were we not feeding them enough? Did they not like the space we had created for them? Then, my daughter found a nest they had made at the foot of one of the huge lleylandi trees that form our back boundary - a nest full of eggs.

It does give me so much pleasure having the chickens. Despite the need to get up early to let them out and to remember to shut them away safely at dusk, I do not regret the decision to get them one tiny bit. The greatest pleasure is how much my children enjoy the task of going to collect the eggs, especially when they don't return empty handed.