Last spring, my family and I decided to start raising backyard chickens. After lots of searching through chicken coop plans I decided I didn’t have the time or the will to build a coop. All the prebuilt coops I could find seemed poorly made. I finally came across Eglu Cube. This thing looked awesome! It’s made of durable plastic and so it is easy to clean. It has wheels so we can move it around the yard. The roosting bars and the poop tray slide right out to let you easily empty that in your compost pile and pressure wash them. The side of the coop opens up for easy access to the nesting box so I can gather the eggs without a problem. It even has an option for an automatic door to safely close in your birds at night and let them out when the sun comes up! When I found the Eglu, our 5 chickens, – Bianca (Buff Orpington), Jane and Margaret (Well Summers), and Hermione and Honey (Easter Eggers) – were about to outgrow the cardboard box we’d been keeping them in in the garage was getting too small. Besides, I was getting tired of rounding them up every night from the back yard to put them back safe in the garage. They were getting fast too! I found myself diving all over the yard to catch them. We should have picked out a coop before getting the chickens, but it worked out in the end. Once I ordered the Eglu, I was counting the days until it arrived.
After about 16 weeks 3 of our chickens started laying. All but the Easter Eggers. Honey and Hermione never laid an egg all summer. During the height of the season we were getting about 3 eggs a day from our 4 layers. All of the chickens stopped laying as the days grew shorter and from the first second week of December through the third week of February. Wen we started getting eggs again (even though our Utah weather brought us lots of snow through early April) the Easter Eggers still weren’t laying. Did we get defective chickens? Pretty soon we would have to decide what to do with our unproductive hens. The Eglu only had room for 6 large chickens and my daughters were not happy to hear me talk of chicken dinner. In early march we finally saw an Easter Egger’s egg! Hermione’s eggs were the biggest of all of our chickens! From what I understand it is quite unusual to get such large eggs from an Easter Egger. Honey still wouldn’t lay.
To our relief, we finally got a full set of five eggs on March 19th 2023! Honey’s eggs were a beautiful blue color and the smallest of the bunch. Having chickens has been especially helpful this spring since egg prices have been so high. Our 5 birds have been producing 3-5 fresh eggs every day, and with their already beautifully colored eggs, we didn’t even need to color eggs for Easter!
I was really surprised when our Easter Eggers didn’t lay last year, and started later than the others. Everything I’ve ready suggested that they should lay at 20 weeks old or so. Have any of you seen a similar behavior with your easter eggers? What have you learned while raising back yard chickens? Please share in the comments section!