Who Fliipped The Switch to the "ON" Position?

Fresh pastured country eggs laid by our happy hens that roam around on 3 acres are a blessing to us.  We love to eat 'em!  Each and every afternoon Benjamin goes out with his basket and gathers eggs in the hen house, the barn, the chicken tractor and numerous other hiding places like in the loft, behind the box fan, in the goat stall, in the trough in the goat barn, at the bottom of the burn pile...  Well, you get the picture.  The hens will lay eggs most anywhere.

Except, Benjamin's egg gathering was slim to none for a while.  On December 5, 2016 a hen laid ONE EGG (you read that right) and then none on the next day, or the next or the next.  Not a single egg in the month of January!  No eggs for the first two weeks of February.  Finally on February 17th he picked up one egg.  The number kept growing and growing and during the month of April, he is picking up about 5 dozen eggs a day.

When the hens weren't producing eggs, we hardly ate or cooked with eggs.  There is a HUGE difference between store-bought eggs and ours.  Now we have plenty eggs to scramble, fry, make quiche with, or cook with in any number of recipes.  We also have plenty to sell to our egg customers and plenty to give away to our family, our neighbors and our friends.  Friends don't let friends eat store-bought eggs!!

So, back to talking about finding hidden nests of eggs, we learned a test to determine the freshness of eggs.  If you take a bucket of water and drop the eggs found in a 'hidden nest,' the rotten ones will float, the old eggs will sink but stand up at the bottom of the bucket, and the fresh ones will lie flat on the bottom.  The rotten eggs get thrown back in the woods or composted in the garden.  The old or questionable eggs get fed to the dogs.  And obviously the fresh eggs get eaten by our family.

The hens are very healthy and fat right now and the yolks of their eggs are a deep yellow-orange color.  The eggs are just beautiful and tasty, too!  We don't wash them unless we absolutely need to. When the hens lay the eggs, they coat the eggs with a "bloom" that seals the eggs from bacteria and gives the eggs a longer shelf life. Once they are washed, their shelf life is shortened.  In the late fall and winter, the hens' production will taper off, but for right now, we are enjoying the eggs.

The incredible, edible egg.  I'm thankful that they are laying in abundance again.