The New Hens are Laying

The new poultry with their nest box and personal livestock guardian.

Our new hens are laying. The first egg we found was a medium-size standard new pullet egg, with a brown shell. Since the new hens and their roos are still confined to a kennel run, I thought it would be nice to provide them with nest boxes. Using the hose, I finished cleaning out the waiting boxes, and after they had drained all day in the sunshine, I lugged a set to the coop and set them atop a pair of logs cut to fireplace length. Lined with a few hands full of hay remnants from the horse pasture, the boxes were set to go.

Recently, when our neighbor's hens abandoned their old nest boxes and moved into the "Chicken Hilton," a very fancy coop with its own fenced yard, I happened to be in the right place at the right time and managed to adopt the two rows of nest boxes. Barbara, a fellow Wilson County Master Gardener and a fine friend, helped me lug them to my truck and told me their history. The pinkish-painted boxes had come to their farm after having served time as book shelves at a local preschool center. A former teacher well-used to scavenging for classroom book shelves, I found the re-homing of the fixtures to farms well-suited to my current life and liked them all the more for their history.

The next time I checked on the hens, one of our white hens had deposited a jumbo size white egg in one of the nest boxes. Since these are young hens, or pullets, I expected that they would all begin by laying small and medium size eggs, but I was wrong. Over the past week we've collected two more white eggs, both jumbo size.

Thanks hens; keep up the good work. We enjoy dining on egg-and-vegetable scrambles frequently, and love the late-season gleanings that provide all varieties of color in those meals. In exchange, I make sure that those caged hens get plenty of fresh greens each day. We will move them onto pasture in time; I would like to see them ranging freely, but still separated from the other breeds of poultry.