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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2xirVUu:
jacquez45:
bomberqueen17:
thesacredreznor replied to your post “ooh ooh so! They’re getting a new batch of day-old hens in October, to…”
ok i had to look at all these chickens because i’m living vicariously through you. have you considered Araucanas? i like them ‘cause they’re super weird looking and lay colorful eggs. or it looks like they’ve got a rare breed special which looks like a fun grab-bag. i’m so excited for you! someday i will get to have my own weird chickens.
I love the idea of araucaunas but I specifically need multicolored feathers that are neither red nor white, because they have those two colors already. [Not that I collect them, but I could.]
We discussed it, but having the occasional blue egg in the batch would probably be more annoying than useful– it would be distracting and weird to customers, unless we had enough of them that there’d be a green one in every dozen or so. It would just alarm people to open their box of eggs and have one so different. As it is the Reds lay any color from almost white to fairly dark brown, and the gradation is subtle enough that it’s not weird if you’re slightly careful when arranging each dozen. (They also don’t sort by size much, so we try to arrange the eggs within each dozen carefully so that a huge and a tiny one aren’t directly next to each other, so you don’t notice it as much. We separate out the jumbos, but that’s only because they won’t fit in the regular carton.) We tend to wash and carton eggs in quantities of like, 40 dozen at a time, and so beyond washing and sorting them, we’d also have to make sure the colors were distributed reasonably… it’d just be one more thing to worry about. So, probably no Easter Eggers, for now, and preferably no white-egg layers either, though it’d be easier to mix white eggs into brown ones since some of them are pretty pale…
also, I love Easter Eggers, but they’re unreliable layers. My RIRs are little bratty egg-a-day robots and one of them lays for nine months of the year (no supplemental lighting or whatever the hell people do to make chickens lay in winter). The Easter Egger? she miiiight lay 5 days a week in high summer, and she only starts laying in May and ends in late August/early September.
Gorgeous, sweet, and her eggs are pretty as hell, but I’m glad I’m not reliant on her for income. Hell, I’m glad I’m not reliant on her for BREAKFAST: that’s what the RIRs are for.
The commercial flock is about 300 strong, and they’re all Rhode Island Red hybrid crosses– a commercial breed where the red is a sex-linked trait so the chicks can be sexed error-free (*ha almost. we have like. a dozen roosters. They’re white! But they were reddish as chicks, though there was some deliberate laziness in sexing, we suspect. We don’t mind; we guarantee fertile eggs for a couple of our customers who do hatchings at schools, and the roosters are good defenders too as I mentioned above). [The hybrid gets marketed with different names, always with Red or Brown in the name, but they’re clearly Rhode Island Red hybrids. They’re quite lovely birds, with many subtle color variations, and they’re nosy and canny and funny, but they’re also egg-robots.)
There are solar lights on the flock, so they’ll be getting 15 hours of light all year round. Which does shorten their useful life a little, but means that we don’t lose the income in winter. Demand for eggs goes down a little in winter, but since we have never quite met that demand, we still sell out every week all year round. So… Arguably, our hens still have a much more pleasant life than most commercial flocks, so the added pressure to lay all winter doesn’t really impact their quality of life that much.
If I had some dead-weight Easter Eggers in there for looks, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they didn’t pull their weight. But it would make it even more annoying to have to sort out the green eggs.
I know several people who delightedly keep them in their backyard flocks– those, and Buff Orpingtons, the veggie manager and I were agreeing, if we just had a backyard flock and didn’t really need to concern ourselves with production, we’d love those breeds for the look and their temperament. Orpingtons are so friendly!
jacquez45:
bomberqueen17:
thesacredreznor replied to your post “ooh ooh so! They’re getting a new batch of day-old hens in October, to…”
ok i had to look at all these chickens because i’m living vicariously through you. have you considered Araucanas? i like them ‘cause they’re super weird looking and lay colorful eggs. or it looks like they’ve got a rare breed special which looks like a fun grab-bag. i’m so excited for you! someday i will get to have my own weird chickens.
I love the idea of araucaunas but I specifically need multicolored feathers that are neither red nor white, because they have those two colors already. [Not that I collect them, but I could.]
We discussed it, but having the occasional blue egg in the batch would probably be more annoying than useful– it would be distracting and weird to customers, unless we had enough of them that there’d be a green one in every dozen or so. It would just alarm people to open their box of eggs and have one so different. As it is the Reds lay any color from almost white to fairly dark brown, and the gradation is subtle enough that it’s not weird if you’re slightly careful when arranging each dozen. (They also don’t sort by size much, so we try to arrange the eggs within each dozen carefully so that a huge and a tiny one aren’t directly next to each other, so you don’t notice it as much. We separate out the jumbos, but that’s only because they won’t fit in the regular carton.) We tend to wash and carton eggs in quantities of like, 40 dozen at a time, and so beyond washing and sorting them, we’d also have to make sure the colors were distributed reasonably… it’d just be one more thing to worry about. So, probably no Easter Eggers, for now, and preferably no white-egg layers either, though it’d be easier to mix white eggs into brown ones since some of them are pretty pale…
also, I love Easter Eggers, but they’re unreliable layers. My RIRs are little bratty egg-a-day robots and one of them lays for nine months of the year (no supplemental lighting or whatever the hell people do to make chickens lay in winter). The Easter Egger? she miiiight lay 5 days a week in high summer, and she only starts laying in May and ends in late August/early September.
Gorgeous, sweet, and her eggs are pretty as hell, but I’m glad I’m not reliant on her for income. Hell, I’m glad I’m not reliant on her for BREAKFAST: that’s what the RIRs are for.
The commercial flock is about 300 strong, and they’re all Rhode Island Red hybrid crosses– a commercial breed where the red is a sex-linked trait so the chicks can be sexed error-free (*ha almost. we have like. a dozen roosters. They’re white! But they were reddish as chicks, though there was some deliberate laziness in sexing, we suspect. We don’t mind; we guarantee fertile eggs for a couple of our customers who do hatchings at schools, and the roosters are good defenders too as I mentioned above). [The hybrid gets marketed with different names, always with Red or Brown in the name, but they’re clearly Rhode Island Red hybrids. They’re quite lovely birds, with many subtle color variations, and they’re nosy and canny and funny, but they’re also egg-robots.)
There are solar lights on the flock, so they’ll be getting 15 hours of light all year round. Which does shorten their useful life a little, but means that we don’t lose the income in winter. Demand for eggs goes down a little in winter, but since we have never quite met that demand, we still sell out every week all year round. So… Arguably, our hens still have a much more pleasant life than most commercial flocks, so the added pressure to lay all winter doesn’t really impact their quality of life that much.
If I had some dead-weight Easter Eggers in there for looks, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they didn’t pull their weight. But it would make it even more annoying to have to sort out the green eggs.
I know several people who delightedly keep them in their backyard flocks– those, and Buff Orpingtons, the veggie manager and I were agreeing, if we just had a backyard flock and didn’t really need to concern ourselves with production, we’d love those breeds for the look and their temperament. Orpingtons are so friendly!
