The odd egg out

This morning, one of the Chooky girls laid an enormous egg.

It weighed in at a massive 100gms.  I zeroed the scale for the cup measure.

Weighing this one made me want to compare  its weight  to others recently gathered. The previous largest egg weighed in at 75g.  The 100g egg is pictured here with a 75g and a 57g to show the difference.

This massive egg looks to be the odd egg out in the egg storage section of the fridge. I suspect it is sitting higher in the egg carton than the others.

I wonder if it is a double-yolker or if the shell is extra thick?

The numbers on the eggs are the date they were laid - do you mark your eggs like this?

Thank you Chooky girls.

Which is whose?

Who'd have thought that eggs could be so different. Who'd have thought that you can tell from the egg which of the chooky girls produced it.

Mavis lays eggs with lots of white spots on a darkish background. Strange given that she has the lightest feather colour.

Myra lays lovely even-coloured beige eggs even though she has the darkest feather colour of the four chookies.

Only two of the four chooky girls are laying at the moment but being able to tell which egg belongs to which chicken makes it easy to work out who is laying and who is not.

Thank you chookies for your lovely eggs!

PS: You will tell me if a spotty egg means that the hen is not getting what she needs wont you?

Our first egg

I feel strangely proud,  you see yesterday morning I found our first egg.

I am pretty sure that it was Myra who laid this first one. Her comb is the largest and she was acting a little strangely early that morning.

I found it when I went to let the chookies out at around 10am and it was still warm. Myra had made a lovely straw nest to lay her egg, in a spot behind a bale of lucerne, nice and tucked away.

I wonder why she chose that spot and not a nesting box?

I am not sure why I have this little strange feeling in my chest, after all Myra did all the work.

Myra on her first day in the coop -  she's a little older now

It's just that it feels like the beginning of something. We have been here 6 months now and progress has at times seemed slow.

But the winter vegetables are planted and thriving and the new vegetable patch is being fenced to exclude the wallabies. The citrus are in and soon it's time to buy bare rooted fruit trees.

The home paddock is now empty of agisting stock and is resting up but there are plans for a house cow and some sheep and maybe a pig.

I am tinkering with various little rehabilitation experiments to improve and support the native pasture. The dam wall, once scared by eroding hoofs, is now greening up with at least 5 different grass species all in late-autumn flower. I am starting to identify grasses from a distance. I am gradually winning the battle with the thistles by hand slashing and hoeing them and,

we have an egg, a beautiful native grass-grazed egg. And there should be another one this morning...