Chicken Facts-Egg Color

I've been, as of late coming across a few articles where whoever wrote them clearly didn't research what they were writing about.  I really don't feel like creating an account at each site to comment so I'm simply going to compile the articles here, on this blog, with corrections.

Some time last month I read an article on yahoo news about egg color, if the colors matter, what it means.  In the article I read it stated that brown eggs come from brown chickens, white from white chickens and that was the only difference.  I will agree with the article, there is no nutrition difference between white, brown, chocolate (colored), olive, pink, or green/blue eggs. 

The nutrition in the egg comes from the feed the chicken eats, and how healthy she is.  It's very easy for a consumer to see how healthy their eggs are, when they crack them open what color is the yolk?  Most of your store bought eggs come from hens in cages that get fed a laying feed designed to get them to lay as many eggs as possible, on these you should notice the yolk will be a light yellow color.  On your true free range eggs you'll notice the color of the yolk is orange, a very bright happy shade of orange.  The reason for this is because free range hens are able to eat grass, veggies, bugs, and other yummy things chickens like to eat so they have more nutrients for their eggs, plus they get out in the sun and naturally get more vitamin D.  Healthier hen, brighter colored egg yolks.

Now, as for the egg color, what does that all mean?  While it's true some colored hens do lay certain colored eggs, for example Road Island Reds will lay brown eggs, and White Leghorns will lay white eggs, the chicken's color does not determine the egg color.  Brown Leghorns still lay white eggs, White Rocks and Road Island Whites both lay brown eggs.  What then makes an egg the color it is?  All brown eggs are really white.  If you crack one open you'll notice inside of the shell it's white, not brown.  The reason it appears brown is when hens lay eggs they 'paint' them brown.  If you get a fresh laid brown egg you can sometimes wipe off the brown coloring and see the white egg underneath.  It's kinda cool and I've actually done it a few times cleaning eggs from my hens.  Sometimes, like a printer a brown egg layer will run low on pigment and the brown eggs will turn out speckled, lighter then normal, or half painted.  Nothing is wrong with the egg, the flavor will still be fine she just 'ran out of ink'.

 What about those blue/green/pink eggs then? Those eggs are really that color, if you crack one open you'll see the inside of the shell is the same color as the outside of the shell.  This is due to a genetic trait in that breed of chicken due to selective breeding.  Nothing is wrong with the eggs the hens are just breed to lay them that way.

Incubator Life Hack

For those who like to run incubators to hatch their own chicks, ducks, and the like.  I thought of this while cleaning my incubator to run another batch today, it's a simple one that I'm not sure many people have thought to do.

For those who use regular, not digital thermometers, before you put it in your incubators place it in a ziplock bag (make sure it's clean), once you've run the incubator and hatched your babies simply take the thermometer out of the bag, throw out the bag and you've got a nice clean thermometer you can reload into a bag for the next batch.  It makes cleaning them a lot easier since babies tend to crawl over everything while they dry off.

Good Place For a Nap

On top of my other brothers and sisters that didn't hatch yet of course...

My Rouen and Pekin duckies are finally proud parents to a bunch of peeping babies.  They're a mixed breed mostly though so they should be interesting growing up (I'll be sure to take a lot of pictures of them since I noticed not to many pictures Rouen/Pekin mixes online.)

Spring Time Tease

If my weather is like anyone else's then you know what's going on here, nice warm weather one week then suddenly frost the next.  The frost decided to happen the day the Farmer's Almanac called for the last frost day, and the next few days after.  I didn't start putting in my veggies yet so I didn't loose anything there, though I did put in some flowers for butterflies and bees but those appear fine.  My herbs are by luck still in pots inside, I simply haven't had time to finish the raised beds they will go into.

As for the fruit trees... The frost hit the day after my apple tree's blossomed.  The peaches and crab apple blossoms have already come and gone.  I'm not sure what this will mean for the fall fruit harvest (I need all the apples and peaches I can get for more butters.) I also have noticed a lack of bees with the cold snap.  Before the temps dropped I saw bees everywhere, now I haven't seen them most of this week.

The weather fooled my out door barn cats too I noticed.  Last week we had temperatures in the 80s-90s, and the cats started to shed their winter coats. 

Kind of hoping spring decides to come back so I can finish getting my flowers in, and get the rest of my gardens in before it's to late.

Chicken Math Part 2

So Tractor Supply has their Chick Days now.  I went in last week to get ducks, and two types of chickens.  They didn't have them so I came out with 8 Silver Laced Wyandotte and two pullets of an unknown breed.

Skip ahead to this week, go into Tractor Supply for feed... and came out with the ducks I wanted, one unknown duck, my best guess is Kahaki Campbell but I'll have to see when it gets older.  I also walked out with 5 bantam silkies, and one unknown, it's got the coloration of a silkie, but it has the normal amount of chicken toes so another mystery to see when he gets old.

To add to the fluffy overload, my ducks eggs are due to hatch next week.  I'm not sure how many have ducks in them, I candled and saw a few so with any luck I'll have (more) baby duckies next week.

It's An....Egg?

It was nice and kinda warm today, maybe I good thing I guess.  I walked out to see what my ducks were doing, after noticing they had been quieter then normal (the Pekin love to chat.)  Walking up to their pen with their breakfast they rushed toward me like normal so I thought maybe they had just been enjoying the sunshine.

Nope.

 

Apparently someone laid an egg toward the front of the pen and they were scared of it.  Food of course won over the scarey egg thing.

Now I have this duck egg in my kitchen and I'm not really sure what to do with it.  Hubby did want to try duck eggs, but it's the girls first egg so I dunno.  Eat, bake with, or see if they lay me more and try to hatch them out...such choices.

I love the Spring Time

Sadly it's not even close to spring yet.  Winter did give me a nice break today so I could go outside and look at the herb bed I've been building.  Right now it's just walls and a bunch of leaves, grass clippings and other compostable matter, but come spring it will be a rather large bed with 6 different flowering herbs. (Honestly right now it kinda looks like a mess of stuff.)  Still the weather was nice enough for me to add more stuff to it to break down, and allowed me time to realize how much more work I need to do on it.

Being grounded inside to to ice and cold isn't any fun, but I've been passing the time by herb shopping online both for prices and for uses of herbs.  Thanks to my husband's want of bees I've been learning what herbs they love to and what ones will help them. (For example did you know if you don't want your honey to crystallize you can plant sage and the pollen they will collect from that will help keep honey as a liquid.)

Still spending all day shopping and learning isn't helping to keep my urge to grow plants in check and I found myself starting some catnip in a window box planter.  If nothing else I'll have some healthy catnip for teas for myself till spring, and my hope is I can take the plants I start now and repot them as needed, and eventually move them outside to a new home.  Though I got my first 'new plant' seeds in this week, lavender for a bed, which now has me wanting to try to grow a few seeds of that now too.  I say say new because I already have seeds for Echinacea/Purple Cone Flower and a few others from my own plants.  Oh well, I guess I'll just need to find something else to occupy my time as a way to maybe kill my planting bug.

I assume I'm not the only one out there counting down the days till they can get outside and play in the dirt.