During All This Panic!

Well, after all the panic of the past week, it has gone almost unnoticed that one of the new point of lay hens produced her first egg!

We thought they would never lay any!  If the information I was given was correct, they are now 23 weeks old and should have started before now!  Anyway, its now Saturday 22nd September, and we have had 4 eggs off of one of the new girls, and another came into lay today!  Just another 10 to go, and that's another dozen eggs a day!

Also, I think the old ex battery girls were in a moult for the past few months, because at the moment I am getting between 6 and 11 eggs a day, as opposed to 4-6 for the past few months.

When we first got the ex batts, they were laying quite well, in fact 3 were laid in the car bringing them home!  And as it was more than we needed for ourselves, I decided to put a notice up out the front selling my eggs.  I waited for several weeks, giving eggs to friends and family, then I started to get customers!  I was only sellng them for £1.20p a dozen, because as they are from ex battery hens, the eggs don't look as uniform as the supermarket eggs.  you get different colours, different sizes and shapes.  Wrinkled shells etc.  But my customers didn't mind.  They felt they were helping to do their bit too, to help these poor old ex battery hens lead a normal life again!  I don't make a profit on my eggs at the moment, as all monies that I get for the eggs, goes towards the hens feed and shavings etc, but its been nice that they had been self sufficient, all this time until they started to moult!

I had to cover my sign up a couple of months ago, because I just wasn't getting enough eggs to sell to anyone!  One or two people still came to the door to ask if there were any eggs spare, and if there were, then I'd let them have them.  Hopefully I can soon uncover my sign again once the new girls start to lay in earnest!!

 Mind you, I'll have to put the price up to £1.40 or something.  But most people around here charge £2.00 a dozen!  Feed prices have gone through the roof.  I am paying £1 more per bag than I was in April!  I had a customer today, who said everyone else around is putting up their prices because of the price of feed.  His son works for a pet food company as an accountant, and stuff like wheat has gone up from just over £40 a tonne, to about £120!!!  That's bad, and I can only see it getting worse with all the rain and other bad weather we've had this year!