Finally, fresh eggs again!  One of the younger hens has started laying again after her molt, and she laid her first egg right on the Solstice!  Fancy that!?  Today, one of the older hens laid her first egg after her molt.  I was beginning to think I was going to have to keep paying $4.50/carton for cage-free eggs for many more weeks…  There has been such an egg shortage here!

Last year wasn’t like this, there was always one hen laying sporadically.  However, this year, all four hens came to a screeching halt on their egg-laying and molted simultaneously.  It was like a massacre in the yard – feathers everywhere – I was always worried a neighborhood dog had gotten into our yard where our chickens free-range.  The chickens looked hilarious – this one without a tail, that one’s under-wings bare, the other completely disheveled, the fourth one like it had been through a Friday night bar fight…

When you’re at the peak of the egg-bounty and you can’t use them fast enough, much less give them away fast enough, you take them for granted.  You think, why do we have four chickens?  It’s too many!  The minute you hit the dead of winter, a whole flock of chickens wouldn’t be enough!

The hens can’t wait until the yard grass greens back up again, in the meantime they will have to make due with the green outline of the septic drain field…yum!