Free Range Eggs – Increasing Production

Are you raising chickens or thinking of raising chickens? Are you looking forward to lots of fresh free range eggs? That’s the main reason we decided to get chickens – for the free range eggs. Some people have told us that if you don’t have a rooster your hens won’t lay as many eggs. After spending a couple nights around roosters when we were vacationing in Puerto Rico, we decided we did NOT want a rooster.

As Dave wrote the other day, we ended up getting four silky hens from friends. Our friends told us that the hens may not lay that much for a couple days, until they acclimate to their new environment.  We will have had the chickens a week on Wednesday night. From Thursday morning through Monday night we collected a total of 5 eggs.

My dad stayed with us for a few days over the weekend and gave us some advice. He raised chickens and sold the eggs to pay for his clothing and school supplies as a teenager.

We were collecting the eggs each day as we found them and noticed that the hens weren’t too happy when they returned to their nesting box to discover the egg they’d been sitting on was gone.  I felt so sorry for them, but the eggs were never going to turn into chicks without a rooster. We couldn’t leave them there to rot no matter how badly my mother’s heart went out to them.

Daddy suggested we get some faux eggs and put them in the nesting box. He said the hens would lay better if there was at least an egg or two there.

This morning after I went for my workout at the gym, I stopped by Tractor Supply and picked up two ceramic eggs. Around noon, when I got home from the gym, there was one egg in the nesting box and one out in the chicken run. This was the third egg we’d found in the chicken run — just outside the hen house near the little ramp that the hens use to walk down to the ground. I have to crawl inside the run to get the eggs that are there. So I decided not to replace that egg with a ceramic one.

One of the black hens was setting on a second egg in the nesting box. When I threw some feed, she left the hen house briefly to eat. While she was off the egg, I replaced the one in the nesting box with a ceramic egg. I then placed the second ceramic egg in the corner of the hen house, farthest away from the exit.

I noticed the black hen didn’t squawk when she returned to the nesting box and found the ceramic egg. I don’t think she knew the difference.

This evening around 7:30, Dave and I went back out to the hen house and found that the chickens had knocked the ceramic egg that I’d placed on the floor of the hen house outside the door. It was lying on the ground where we’ve been finding the other eggs. I thought perhaps the hens realized it was fake and tossed it out. Now, I’m wondering if they just move around and push the eggs out of the house by accident, and they fall on the ground just outside the hen house.

When I reached in the nesting box, I found THREE more eggs. That gave us a total of 5 eggs today! That’s a record day. It’s very unusual for a hen to lay more than one egg a day, but somebody laid two! I put both ceramic eggs in the nesting box and we’ll see what happens going forward.

I’m hopeful that these faux eggs will keep all the hens laying regularly.

Note: We’ve been told that unwashed eggs can set out on the counter for a week and be just fine. This is why in the photo above, the eggs haven’t been washed. We just wash them before we use them.