Egg production went way down about a month ago, but I wrote it off as our ancient hens hitting "menopause."  I should have searched harder for the answer --- 24 eggs hiding in the deep grass of the pasture!

Usually, our chickens are very good about laying in the nest box since we keep it comfy with clean straw or leaves and seed the pot with golf balls.  But a lot of factors have made the spot less conducive to laying lately.  First, the broody hen took over the box, then the tweens got bigger and bigger until the huge coop Mark built me started to feel cramped.  I guess that with two strikes against the coop, the straw-like, dense grass matted down in parts of the pasture looked more like a nest.

Egg production rebounded about a week ago, so I'm hoping the naughty hens have decided to behave.  These old eggs would probably be fine, but since we're not desperate, we'll use them to give Lucy a treat for the next few weeks.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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