Eggs-cellent Fun

About a month before spring officially arrives, our chickens go into overdrive with their laying. Chickens are light sensitive, needing 14-16 hours of daylight for peak laying. However, I don't think that explains everything, because our chickens produce more in the spring than in the fall at a time with equivalent number of hours of sunlight. Anyway, beginning in late February, we start overflowing with eggs. Every so often we'll get a truly jumbo egg like the one Peter's holding. Poor hen. I can just hear her saying, "Ouch!!! I quit! I'm never doing that again!"

                                                         Here's that one double-yoked egg, opened into a baking pan. 

We tried dyeing eggs with natural dyes this year, following the instructions in Mother Earth News.  It was quite a bit of fun using onion skins (yellow), beets (sort of reddish), and blueberries (blue).

We tried red and yellow onion skins, but both produced a similar color. The blueberry dye looked pinkish, but when rinsed, turned blue. The beets were disappointing, so next time we try this I think we'll experiment some more. Then with a good red, yellow, and blue, we can see if we can come up with pretty secondary colors. 

                                                                 The finished product!