While the arrival of the first couple of eggs is of course thrilling, once the chickens really start producing them en masse it will become completely routine, and therefore not worth blogging about on an egg-by-egg basis. But for those who are interested in how the chickens are getting on in terms of their secondary function (after entertainment), this graph shows progress on a weekly basis, the dates referring to the first Monday of the relevant week. Week One begins on 18 June 2012, the day they arrived.
For the first three weeks, we assumed that Pearl was the only hen actually producing any eggs, on the grounds of her being the oldest and biggest and the most wont to disappear into the chicken house for lengthy periods of time during the day, possibly with a newspaper or a trashy novel under her wing. This has now been confirmed as correct, since we more or less caught her in the act of laying a medium brown egg.
But the start of week four saw a dramatic new development, with four eggs turning up in one day (i.e. doubling the total output to date): two a similar colour to the ones seen so far, one paler and faintly speckled, and one off-white. In theory, Ida isn’t ready to lay yet, so we don’t know how four were produced in one day, though it’s not completely unknown for a single hen to produce two. But it seems certain that three of the chickens are now laying.
Anyway, to reflect this, the graph has now had two more bars added to colour-code the eggs.