Keeping Chickens

First Chicken Egg Nesting Box

Toby comes in the house after being dropped off and the first thing he asks is; ‘has anyone checked for eggs this morning Dad?’ He gets a negative from me and then rushes off up the garden to check. He then shouts ‘we’ve got a egg, we’ve got a egg..!’

So I shout up ‘are you joking?’ (’are you yolking?’) or something along those lines… Toby is a bit of a joker, so it’s not past him to pull my leg; especially as he knows that we’ve been waiting to hear his happy cries of ‘the chicken has laid a egg’ for a few days.

I then shout, ‘leave it, I want to take a photo!’ grab the camera and rush off down the garden to the chicken house to take a picture.

Chicken Egg In Toby's Hand Nest Box

Sure enough there’s one perfect, if a little ’small’ chicken egg sitting in the nesting box - the clever chickens have laid a egg!

The surprising thing about this, is that we didn’t ‘egg-spect’ any egg joy for another couple of weeks. The chickens are now 20 weeks old, the chicken breeder told us not to expect any eggs until they got to about 22 weeks. So our clever little chickens have laid a egg two weeks early!

The chicken’s combs and wattles have been colouring up and growing bigger. Underneath their beaks, they now have wattles that would make for a impressive double or even triple chin in humans! They wobble as they cluck around the garden and apparently this is a good sign that the chicken is maturing from a juvenile into a adult chicken, and soon will be laying eggs.

Chicken Lays A Egg Toby Holding

So Toby grabs the egg and carefully holds it as I take photos. He’s telling the chickens that they’re ‘very clever’ and that they’re ‘good girls’ - he’s going to make a excellent little chicken keeper!

We text Julia to tell her that the chickens have laid a egg - she’s gone shopping, and asks what it tasted like. Of course we didn’t eat it, we saved it to show ‘Mum’, but there you have it; our first chicken lays an egg!

The next morning, I get up with the boys - it’s Sunday, so Julia’s turn for a lie in. I go down to the chickens and check for eggs and let them into their home made chicken run. No eggs when I look.

The boys and I have a cereal breakfast and then I start cooking a ‘fry-up’ as it’s the weekend at about 10:00am.

I tell Toby to check for eggs, and once again hear the happy shout, ‘we’ve got eggs!’ and ‘clever chickens’ etc. He runs down the garden holding the egg and I’m thinking, ‘please don’t drop it, please don’t drop it…’

Two Chicken Eggs Toby & Zach

He then hands me another egg. This egg is slightly smaller than the first, so I think at the time that it’s a egg from a different chicken. We then get Toby to pose for a few more snaps holding both the eggs.

Toby asks whether we’re going to cook the eggs for breakfast, and I say yes… The other option is to wait for another day and see if the chickens lay another egg, but we can’t wait, so they’re put on the side to be fried.

I decide to give one to Toby and the other to Julia. Zach and I will have the last of our ’supermarket bought’ free range eggs. Zach wouldn’t know the difference yet anyway I don’t think, and hopefully Julia will share hers with me…

Anyway, so I’ve cooked off the bacon and fried some bread, next I come to crack the two eggs that our chickens have laid. As I said above, one of the eggs is a bit bigger than the other, so I assumed that we’ve got two different hens laying eggs now.

First Chicken Eggs Frying

I crack the bigger of the two eggs and can’t believe what I’m seeing… We’ve got a ‘double yolker’, I can’t remember when we last had a double yolked egg, so this is amazing in it’s self. Our first chicken egg is a double yolker!

Maybe the eggs are from the same bird? or maybe they’re from two different birds.

I’m not ‘expert’ enough to know, but as you can hopefully see from the image, the eggs are perfect. If a little small, the chickens are still ’smallish’ so I suppose they’ll grow in size as the chickens grow.

Our first garden chicken eggs are served up with bacon, tomatoes, fried bread and toast.

Garden Eggs Compared To Supermarket Eggs

I also cooked some supermarket eggs at the same time, and I think from the image you can see the size difference between the eggs our chicken has laid and the shop bought eggs.

Another thing is the colour of the yolk. Our chickens have produced eggs with a deep yellow coloured yolk, The yolks from the shop bought eggs are much paler in comparison.

Also you can see by the size of the whites, that the shop bought eggs are much bigger. The white also has a different kind of consistency than the shop bought eggs.

I can honestly say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or should that be the proof of the egg is in the eating?! Our eggs taste completely different to the supermarket eggs. They taste ‘fresher’. One is a day old and one was laid this morning, so we at least can’t get any fresher than that!

So there we have it… Our chickens have laid their first eggs and we now are proper chicken keepers!