Eggs: October 2007 Archives

I recieved 6 blue orpington eggs. I set them in my incubator. I candled at day 4 and couldn't see any signs of veins. I candled again at day 7. No sign of growth. I gave them another 6 days and still I saw no veins.

This morning I pulled the plug on the incubator. I cracked open the eggs. Just as I suspected. The eggs are not fertile.

I am cleaning the incubator and getting it ready for another try.

Steve asked for a 'simple' chicken salad. He further clarified a very basic chicken salad. Which meant he didn't want the apples and craisens and walnuts in it.

I had the last of the chickens we had processed in the roaster so that I could pick the meat and can another batch of broth. I picked out a good portion of tender chicken and chopped it.

I made a cup of my homemade mayonnaise

I also boiled up a few of my little pullet eggs.

Chicken, boiled egg, mayo, salt, pepper, chopped celery and onion, garlic powder. Simple chicken salad just like he asked.

I served it on pumpernickle bread with lettuce and tomato.

It was really good along side a steaming bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup.

Like my bowl? Ross under $3. w00t!

My little Rhode Island Red pullets are laying me an egg or two every day. They are such lovely little treasures to find when I go out to the barn. They taste great, too!

I used one of them to make mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise is very easy to make. It is a simple combination of egg and oil that is emulsified and seasoned.

Take 1 home grown farm fresh egg and 1 cup of salad oil. Gourmet mayonnaises are made with combinations of different oils. Learn to make a good basic mayonnaise then experiment with other oils.

I used a stick blender but a food processor works just as well. If you have the arm strength a nice cold bowl and a wire wisk will work, too.

Season with salt, white pepper, a dash of ground mustard powder and a sprinkle of lemon juice. You can season it for your taste and preference.

Most recipes call for the egg to be drizzled slowly with the oil as it is being beaten to make a great emulsification. It takes more than a few minutes to make the mayo in this manner. If you use a stick blender add the egg and oil to a deep container and whip it up in under 10 seconds.

I do not always make my own mayonnaise. I am a die hard Duke's mayonnaise fan. I cannot live without my Duke's - ask most any southern cook ;) LOL Sometimes I run short or forget to pick up an extra jar (I try to keep at least one in the pantry at all times but it flies off the shelf around here) and that is when I make my own. I also like to make my own for potato salad. Yummy.

Some mayonnaises are far more yellow. This is from using 2 or 3 egg yolks in place of the whole egg. You can search out alot of different recipes on the internet. I prefer whiter mayonnaise. There are some who think using an egg white lowers the quality of the mayonnaise but I'll put my home grown eggs up against their store bought yolks any day of the week and will have a better mayonnaise. I am that confident in the goodness of my fresh eggs.

Give it whirl and tell me how you did. Whatever is left over you can put in a jar and put in the fridge. It will keep for a while.

Many comments or emails are coming my way about the safety of raw eggs. Let me say this - I trust my eggs to be clean and healthy. I do not go around partaking of raw eggs or raw egg products that I am not sure of. The warnings about eating raw eggs and the chance of salmonella is usually more likely to occur in a commercial egg than a home grown egg.

I trust my eggs.

During the heat of the summer it probably wasn't a good idea to get hatching eggs. The post office handled them so poorly many of them arrived broken and the box leaking. I gave up on hatching eggs until the weather started to get cooler. This morning I will set another batch of eggs.

This set of eggs is the long anticipated blue orpingtons and the pure bred blue/black americauna that lays a beautiful blue egg.  (NOT a mutt bred chickens that lays a varied color of egg known as easter eggs/easter eggers.)

I have been carefully regulating the new incubator and happily anticipating the arrival of the eggs. The eggs were shipped monday morning and I received the box wednesday morning.

Every egg was perfect. Nothing broken. Everything appears to be in great shape. Even the weather has cooperated and remained in the upper 50's to the lower 70's. Hopefully this hatch will have better results than the last. I do blame the extreme heat as well as rthe rough handling of the post office for that lost batch of eggs. We checked the eggs after 25 days and only one had the slightest signs of a developing chick. It was very sad.

Wish me luck. I think I am going to need it. I am very nervous this time around. The six brown eggs are from blue orpingtons. Beautiful birds that live in the North Georgia Mountains. Send me good vibes. The perfect hatch would be 100% and 5 pullets and 1 cockeral. Yes, I do know I am blowing smoke! It doesn't hurt to ask for what you want!

The blue eggs are from blue and black americuanas. It would indeed be more wishful thinking to ask for a majority of pullets but I figure in for a penny, in for a pound. Come on pullets! I have eleven of these eggs. I don't know why the color washes out but I wish you could see how pretty and blue they are.

I know you all don't respond well to these posts I write about me and the livestock. I guess you all don't want to know all those mundane things but this is what is going on these days out here on the farm.

 - Green Acres is the place to be - Farm Living is the life for me!

I have been wanting to set up a smaller incubator than the one I made back in the summer. The original incubator is huge and can set a flat of eggs (2.5 dozen) at one time. I don't want to have to regulate and run that big box just to hatch a few eggs at a time.

I was trying to think outside of the box and away from the the styrofoam coolers. I asked myself what can a chicken loving housewife use to make a small incubator out of inexpensively? How can she do it safely and without worrying about the electrical and know she did it right?

So, I built a new one.

I used an old breadbox with a plexiglass window insert that I found at the goodwill for $7. You probably have one or know someone with an old one they don't use any more. If I was back home in Georgia I know my sister has 2 I could have gotten!

I picked up one of the $11 thermometer/Hygrometer with probe combos by acurite (I have one but I wanted a second one incase I decided to use both bators at one time), a water wiggler $0.88, $5 a bottle lamp kit, and an $8 single pole hot water heater thermostat. I already had some little wood screws, electrical tape and a surge protector.

First I secured my thermostat to the upper top corner of the breadbox. I did so because I want the thermostat as far away from the heat source as possible. I want to be sure the eggs on that side don't get too cool.

Next I drilled a hole for the lamp kit making sure the lamp neck was placed so that when the lid closes the light bulb is not touching or extended out too far.

Using the bottle lamp kit I threaded the hollow metal tube through the hole and then threaded the electrical wire through the tube and screwed down both ends to make it tight.

Following the lamp instructions I wired the ribbed wire to the brass screw (see #1). I then cut a piece of the wiring and ran that from the silver screw through the side hole to the thermostat (see #3). I took the other wire coming into the box and threaded it through the side hole and wired it to the other screw on the thermostat (see #2).

It wasn't hard. You can do it. Take your time. If you wire it wrong when you plug it in your breaker will trip. You'll know then what to do. LOL

I then cut a piece of shelf liner and laid it in the bottom so the eggs would be coushioned and not roll.

The light works, the thermostat works.

I did caulk around the little window so that warm air wouldn't easily escape and cause the light to run more than it needed.

I did not drill any vent holes in mine for 2 reasons. The humidity in my house is at 52% and has beed holding that for the past week. The lid has a lillte gap along one side that I think will let the bator breath properly. If I need more venting it won't take 1 min to drill out a hole. We'll see.

If you build one you might need to drill holes and plug them with a cork as needed.

I also went back and added some of the weather stripping you put around dorrs and windows to stop drafts around the inside where the lid closes down. I was loosing alot of heat that way.

Now it is sitting and warming up. It will run from now until the Blue Orpington eggs I am getting have their 21+ days in the incubator.

I am not one to count my chicks before they hatch so wish me luck. Eggs went in the mail yesterday to be shipped to me. I am on pins and needles hoping they make it to me intact. The post office damaged the last batch I got.

This little bator can sit on my kitchen counter and not be in the way. The big bator I had was always in the way no matter where we had it while testing it. We ended up keeping that one on the dining room buffet with the last batch of eggs.

This one is pretty and won't look out of place on the countertop.

Nothing is wrong with functional and decorative! :D

P.S. Those of you who teach school (Mary!) this is a great idea for spring time. Set eggs in late March and 21 days or so later they would hatch in April.

Once Upon a time on a little farm in Virginia there lived a happy flock of spoiled hens.

Henrietta hen was being moody and would not share the most prized and favored nest box in all of the kingdom with her friend Henny Penny.

So Henny Penny made her own nest on the other side of the hen house in a lovely old feeder box hanging on the wall.

The little rhode island red hen clucked and scratched around in her little nest of chicken crumbles and black oil sunflower seeds.

Until finally one of her friends, another rhode island red, came to see what there was to see. Her friend saw nothing.

Henny Penny ruffled her tail feathers and clucked some more.

This time her friend Ginger, a buff orpington, came to inspect the situation. And she, too, saw nothing.

Henny Penny spun around her nest again. She stuck her head in the corner and pretty much told everyone in the hen house to kiss it that morning. Something was going on that made this day different from all of the others before it.

Henny Penny continued to sit in her little improvised nest. Then suddenly, without warning, she jumped out of the box and wandered away.

This is what she left behind for all the world to see making this day unlike all the other days that came before it. Henny Penny laid her very first egg. Even more importantly she did it while the farmer was there to see it all happen.

Fussy old Henrietta who wouldn't share the most prized and favored nest box of all nest boxes in the kingdom was still clucking and scratching around and couldn't get comfortable but later when the camera was turned off she hopped out of the nest box and left behind one little brown egg, too.

And they all lived happily every after on the tiny farm in Virginia.

The End.

I have a barn full of pullets. A pullet is a female chicken under one year old. After one year they are hens. So, I have about 40+ pullets who became 19 weeks old monday. When they start laying I can expect at the height of the season to collect somewhere around three dozen eggs a day.

Between the ages of 18 - 24 weeks most pullets will begin to lay eggs. They will be small at first but will get bigger and more uniform as the pullet matures. There is no magic number to predict when the pullets will begin to lay. It is sort of like with us females. Mother natures takes her own course and you just can't predict the day and time that the moment will happen.

The cycle for the eggs often follows a 25 hour pattern. If an egg is laid at 8am today it might be 9am tomorrow before that next egg gets laid. But that is not always the rule. Some hens will lay like clockwork at the same time every day. Some hens might lay an egg every other day.

It is very exciting as you approach the age of laying. It is also very frustrating looking each and every day for those first eggs. I am guilty of checking often and then checking again.

Now here is a little lesson - you do not need a rooster to have eggs - beautiful farm fresh eggs. You only need a rooster if you want those eggs to eventually incubate (with or without a hen) and hatch out lovely little chicks.

Please take note of what I am about to tell you -

1. There is not one bit of difference between a brown and a white egg. Nor is there any difference between those and any of the colored eggs from chickens who carry a color gene from an ancestor cross bred with a true ameriaucana.

2. You cannot tell the difference between a fertiled egg and an unfertilized egg. People who say the little white string in an egg is rooster sperm is an idiot.That is the chalaza and it is what attaches to the membrane at the shell to keep the egg yolk centered in the egg.

3. If you did have a fertiled egg the only way to tell is to look VERY carefully at the yolf after a few days and look for a tiny speck called a bullseye where the cells are beginning to form.

4. You can eat fertilized and unfertilized eggs and NEVER know the difference. There is really no difference. You won't be eating a baby chick if you eat a fertilized egg.

5. Fertilized eggs can sit for as long as 10 days or so before the hen has enough to sit on if she goes broody. They do not begin to develop into what will become a chick until they have started the incubating process. It takes lots of continuous warmth provided by a nice fluffy feathered hen or a monitored incubator to begin the process toward a hatching chick.

6. Never count your chicks before the eggs hatch.

I wrote all of this to tell you this story.

Last night I was finishing up with cooking supper (chicken stew from one of our own processed chickens!) so Steve and Colby and Gracie went out to the barn to check the feed and close up. The girls came in first.

Gracie says, "Can I show momma what we found?" 

Colby says, "No, not yet." I said, "If my chickens laid an egg and you all didn't come get me my feelings will be hurt." Not really but maybe? LOL

Steve comes in and the conversation is repeated with him only this time Gracie holds out her hands and in each hand is a little pullet egg.

So I have no idea which two started laying yesterday but I do have an idea since they were found in the nest boxes closest to the door that it was most likely one if my RIR and one of the barred rocks.

You know threatening them is what I think did it. I went out there yesterday morning and said to them all as I filled the feeders, " I took 3 boys out here for being lazy and mean do you girls want to be next? If not, you better get to producing some eggs!"

The photo is two small pullet eggs. They are very light brown. They may or may not have a yolk in them. I'll find out later when I crack them to cook.

How cool is that?

My chickens make me breakfast!