Ane the winners are:

Elinor, Fanny and Kitty! They laid 532 eggs in 2012 (from a high of 67 in April to a low of 6 in December). Their egg production suffered from molting, heat, cold, reduced hours of daylight...but that's still a lot of brown eggs.
 
Emma, Harriet and Lydia laid only 377 eggs (going from Sept. 29 to Nov. 25 with NO green eggs at all), have had two separate but equally ugly molts between April and November and only beat out the other girls in December (25 to 6). Despite this their eggs are prettier and have much harder shells.

They will be 3 in May, 2013. I promised them that I would rededicate myself to keeping this blog about them, post lots of photos and keep the treats coming. Happy New Year!

My chick is fleeing the nest again....

He's been home for three months but tomorrow morning Ian is packing up his truck and heading for Boone and his sophomore year at App State. I envy him as he goes on the mountain because I suspect it will be cooler there than here. This has been a long, hot summer. The girls have done well with the heat- except for the decreased egg production and the ugly molt that Elinor, Fanny and Kitty are experiencing now.

I feel I have been short-changing them. This is a blog about them and I am resolved that I'll be a better blogger on their behalf. Tomorrow, after Ian makes his chicken run......

At least the chickens are all good....

I started the blog to write about my girls in the hen house, but it quickly  became clear that I was using it to let out some emotion that I felt more comfortable writing about than talking about. The girls celebrated their 2nd birthdays (hatched-days?) a few weeks ago and just like the year they were born it has been a late winter and spring of loss.

My grandmother, Ruth, died on March 1 after a brief period of being in the hospital and a nursing home (and back again in both). She was a month short of her 92nd birthday and all of us in her family are left a little bewildered at her passing. We never really thought she'd leave so suddenly (or at all, she seemed indestructible). She outlived her husband by 38 years and her daughter by 23 months.....she never got over mama dying.

Yesterday I walked through her home and in her yard for the last time. I said goodbye to a huge chunk of my life. She lived on a street that when I was a child was home to her aunt, her sister and her brother. Those houses were places to play and hide, they were what I thought of as home when we moved away to join my dad when he was stationed on a base rather than a ship. And now they are all gone....I'm beginning to get an idea of what it must have been like for her, outliving all 11 of her siblings and their spouses, her husband and child, a good many of her nieces and nephews and almost all her friends. I hope that when she died she did indeed go to sleep so she could be with her family, just like she wanted.

Grandma went with us to check out the guys we ended up buying the girls from. She always asked about them, how many eggs they were laying...when she came to our house she'd go out and see them. I supplied eggs to her and she took great pride in showing folks her green and brown eggs. She'd call me when I was coming to her house and ask me to bring  eggs for some of her nieces to say thank you for all the help they were to her. She told everyone about my chickens and would want me to tell them their names. She also tried to convince me and the girls that if they'd let me put their heads under a wing and rock them they'd go to sleep (never happened, but she tried a few times).

If there is any justice in the universe she woke up surrounded by all her family but knows how much she is still loved and remembered.

My son Ian with his great-grandmother Ruth.

Chicken eye candy....will it help the egg count?

Back in October my friend Amy went to the state fair and checked out the poultry exhibit. She took photos of roosters and for Christmas this year she gave the girls a photo collage of some of the handsome fellas and I put it up in their run today. It's on the door of the house, so they get to walk under them every time they go in or out.

Notice the caption:
PLAYHEN
Entertainment for Chicks

I may have hedged my photo opp bets by baiting the bottom of the collage (which is laminated) with peanut butter. May have.....

Kitty, Elinor and Harriet checking out the studs

Elinor seems to be enchanted

Peanut butter is gone, other girls have moved on, but Elinor is still checking them out!

Thanks Amy!

EGG COUNT FOR THE WEEK:

13 BROWN

10 GREEN

Wonder how many will be laid next week?

EGG COUNT, WEEK 1

Since it's my only resolution for 2012 I intend to keep up with the egg count! Jan. 1-7:  22 eggs were laid, 13 brown, 9 green. Keep up the good work!

Today was the first day we got 3 green eggs since back in late August/early September. I was so excited you'd have thought I won the lottery! It's gotten rainy and cooler as the day has gone on but the girls are not bothered by a little rain and they enjoyed the left over biscuits for snack.

The boy is heading back to college on Friday, so our time with him is growing short. My 91 year old grandmother spend a few days in hospital for an infection and I brought her home to stay with us for a few days. She's going home tomorrow but today we made blueberry muffins for the boy to take back to school.

I just need a few uneventful days to catch my breath  and I really enjoyed my poultry therapy this morning, reading and chilling with the girls.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The girls and I hope 2012 is indeed a happy new year. They would like more treats- scratch grains, greens, pasta, corn, oatmeal.....and an expansion of their run please. Harriet would appreciate it if the mean girl, Fanny, would leave her the heck alone.

Kitty and Elinor have backed off picking on her but Fanny hasn't seen the light...not sure why poor Harriet is the target of choice but I run interference when I can and make sure I give her extra treats. She knows I'm a safe place because when I'm outside she's always close by so I can block any aggressor.

I'm making my one resolution: to keep a daily log of their egg production. In the last two weeks Emma/Harriet/Lydia (only two of them but I'm not sure which one other than Emma) have started laying after an almost three month break, so I'll have more than brown eggs to record. It's nice to have green in amongst the brown in the egg bowl. Now I can start supplying granny again- first delivery today.

It's not a resolution, but I'm gonna try to post weekly. If I can just stay off pinterest.......



Hard to get all 6 in a shot- Fanny is off stage-right

We wish you a Merry Christmas

I've had two tall glass vases filled with eggs, green and brown, blown out and waiting for me to do something with them for over a year now. Tonight I sat down and turned many of them into ornaments for the tree.

All I needed was twine, scrapbook paper, a snowflake punch, glue dots and eggs:

I cut the twine, tied the ends together, used the glue dot to hold the twine in place on the end of the egg and put the snowflake on top of that:

They look very festive and just knowing they came from my girls make me smile. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas......