Green Daily

One of my biggest interests, and one of the biggest topics I bring to the table at GreenDaily is a way to live a more sustainable life through raising your own food free of hormones and chemicals. This includes vegetables and animals, but mainly chickens. This series is an on-going introduction to the wonderful world of raising chickens in a non-rural environment.

While it may be fun to hunt Easter Eggs once a year, doing it several times a day can be daunting. As with any animal, you can train your chicken to perform a certain behavior just the way you'd like. In this case though, it's not fetching your slippers or going in a litter box, it's laying their eggs in their nests.

Let's first get one thing straight. Hens don't need roosters to create and lay eggs. Many people don't realize this, but there's a simple distinction. If you want fertilized eggs and to continue the generations of backyard chickens, the roosters will be needed, but to just simply lay unfertilized eggs, a rooster is not needed. In fact, according to most suburban or city codes, roosters are actually illegal to own because of the constant noise they make. No, they don't just crow at dawn.

So at around 18-22 weeks old, your female chickens will begin to lay eggs. You'll want to provide comfortable nest boxes for the chickens to lay, with no threats or dangers to spook them. Right around the 18 week time, place a small ping pong ball in each of the nest boxes to let the chickens know that this is the place to lay the little white things.

If you find that your chickens are laying in various places around your yard, block those places off and continue the ping pong ball trick. They will catch on eventually. If they continue to ignore the nest boxes, you may want to look into the placement of the boxes in the coop. They may be too low to the ground, too close to the door or too drafty. In any of these situations, the chickens will opt for better laying grounds.

For the first year of egg production, the chicken is referred to as a pullet. This is from the time of the first egg-laying to the time when they begin moulting and their egg production slows. Pullets are the most economical chickens to possess, which is the reason most chicken farmers process their pullets after a year. If you're more interested in keeping your chickens as pets, this may not be a concern for you.

Another big concern for egg-laying chickens is broodiness. This happens when a chicken lays on her eggs and refuses to get up. It's a perfectly natural behavior, but it makes collecting the eggs a bit difficult with all the pecking and squaking they'll do. The best prevention for broodiness is to collect the eggs at least twice daily. When the hens see that there are no eggs in their nest, they'll work on laying another one. For this reason, if you go on vacation or are away from your chickens for a few days during the first year of egg production, you'll need to get a friend or family member to collect the eggs daily. Trust me, preventing broodiness is much easier than breaking their broody habit once it get established, which is accomplished by picking the hen up off the eggs, collecting the eggs, and trying your best to prevent her access to that broody spot. Of course, in the situation where you want your hen to raise her eggs until they hatch, brooding is a very good thing.

I hope this little guide helped you with your egg-layers. Be sure to join me for the next installment of this series where I'll cover other chicken behaviors, and common tricks to getting your birds to play nice!