Updates, Updates, and more updates

I had expected to blog sooner than this, but sometimes, life just seems to get in the way.

So, here are a few updates.

Around January 7th, our olive eggers finally started laying.  Well, at least 2 have.  About half of our eggs are now the olive eggs.  It's really cool to look into the egg carton, and see the multi-colored eggs.

January 9th, we had our first snow of the year.  We didn't get a lot, and it was real pretty while it lasted, which wasn't long.

On January 15th, my Boy turned 16!!!  Hard to believe!  He got his permit towards the end of December, so we've been driving.  He's not super thrilled about it., I keep wondering who's kid he really is! (Too bad he looks like me)  Birthday person gets to pick the restaurant.  And where did my boy pick?  Charlies Chicken cause he wanted some Corn dodgers!  He had 2 friends come over after school, and they hung out and played Magic until time to open presents and go get some food.

Over the weekend, I did some work on the chicken coop.  We've had our chicken feeder hanging under the chicken coop. And it works pretty well.  But when it's extremly muddy, wet, well, yucky, it's a real pain to get in there, and get it.  I saw some cool chicken feeders built with PVC pipe recently.  So we decided to make one.  We'll see how well it works.  

I have a 4" pipe that runs from inside the coop, right next to where we keep a 5 gallon bucket with food, down under the coop.  There we made a little stopper and cover so hopefully, we'll not have any problems with it falling out, or with a lot of rain getting in it.

We'll see, and I'll update later on how it's going. (and you can't tell in this picture, but no, it is not sitting on the ground)

Guess that's it really.  I've had one Boy Scout camp out over the weekend.  Saturday night, it got down to 11 degrees and it snowed a bit on both Saturday and Sunday, but overall, everyone had a great time.

Until next time!

Chicken Updates!

So, with the beginning of the new year, I took some time and worked on my Chicken Egg spreadsheet where I record all the eggs and expenses of my chickens.

After looking at how many eggs we had our first year compared to now, I really miss the ISA Brown chickens.  You'll see from the numbers that they just beat the Barred Rock chickens.  I have 3 Olive Eggers that have yet to start laying, so I can't wait for them to start.  Hopefully, Egg production will increase soon.

	2014	2015
January	0	109
February	0	87
March	0	99
April	45	76
May	132	98
June	121	77
July	118	62
August	118	98
September	105	63
October	105	58
November	90	42
December	103	37
Total	937	906

So, in 8.5 months, we had more eggs than we did in the last 12 months.

Pricewise, things are well.  Each egg is costing me 23.9 cents and egg at the moment.  That cost does not include my coop.  Including the cost of our coop, it's 50.3 cents per egg.

That's $2.87/dozen without the coop, and $6.03/dozen with the coop included.

Overall, I'm pretty happy.  We've not lost any birds to predation, which is great!  We lost one bird to being sick, and 3 when they stopped laying, and we turned them into bone broth. That's been some great broth!