Where are my eggs???

Well we've had our chicks and hens for 2 weeks tomorrow and it has been 2 weeks since our Easter egg hen gave us a single egg, it's the only one we've gotten from both of our hens. I've tried everything I could think of to encourage laying but to no success.....and then it occurred to us that they might be molting. Molting is a thing chickens do typically in the beginning of fall (or in this case, late summer) when they grow new feathers and expel old feathers, sort of similar to a snake shedding it's skin and during this period of molting they don't lay eggs. Well that solves the mystery of why we aren't getting eggs. I'm sitting on my couch tonight and happen to look out at the girls jumping up to their roosting spots and see them pull out some feathers and let them go.....yep molting for sure! I guess I can stop searching for eggs like an obsessed egg crazed lunatic.


Here's our lovely ladies in their cozy roosting spots for the night. This is when it's easier to go out and pet them and talk to them and get them more used to us. They're fairly tame for being grown but still a little stand offish to us during daytime hours. Chickens roost at night as a form of protection from predators on the ground. If you ever want or need to catch a chicken, wait until roosting hours (an hour before sunset our girls are up getting ready for bed) chickens are pretty much blind at night and flightless too which is why they roost as high as they can get. Our chicks don't yet roost because they're still babies but as they get to be older in a few weeks, they'll have that same instinct to seek higher places to sleep.

  So this past week we had some crazy weather for July, rain and thunder and lightening storms for a few days (and then crazy humidity for us) Saturday when the bigger storm rolled in we relocated the chick hutch into the coop so the bigger ladies could take refuge inside from the storm and we brought the babies in for a dry night indoors. Moving the chick hutch is a lot of work plus it's heavy so we decided to acclimate the babes early to the older hens in hopes that they'll all be so used to each other by the time the babies start to outgrow that little pen that we can just transfer them all into the larger coop. At least that's the plan and the hens don't seem to mind the babies at all but they still have the safety of the wire between them.

I have a lot of friends that ask me what our setup looks like so here's some pics. This is the chick  hutch. We bought this setup at our local feed store for our original hens who were also babies when we got them. It has a side door to access the upper level where the hens lay eggs, a back door and a flap that shuts on the top of the wire section, it also pulls apart so you can have a free standing hutch without the wire cage section.

And this is our larger coop that's about 50 feet long and 7 feet tall. My husband (and I) built this last summer to give our hens more running room and free range to my garden. Had I known that chickens will eat a garden down to nothing, I would have made their coop smaller! It's kinda shabby looking but we were building in the dead heat of summer and just trying to get something up that would contain our hens that had outgrown the chick hutch. As you can see I still have some of the less tastey veggies (and plenty of weeds and chocolate mint) growing inside. We will renovate this at some point because I want more of a garden space and we could probably do a better build job in a cooler season. 

Here's my little Goldie posing for the camera. The babies have grown so much in just the 2 weeks that they've lived with us. They're starting to be a lot easier to catch and they respond to my talking to them.

Kaitlyn and her little sunny who is getting more white and brown feathers every day...It will be neat to see what they look like in a few weeks after all their baby fluff falls out. 

Here's Edward and Blackie, he is learning to be really gentle with the babies (although he thinks it's funny to make them fly by chasing them around a little) She's our smallest baby and by far our fastest to catch! You can tell she's the runt of the group, she kinda does what everyone else tells her to do and she's very clingy to the other chicks.