Waiting Game

At this point, the Josh had not built the run yet (the long enclosure that attaches to the coop) so the chickens were totally free range in the day, putting themselves to bed in the roost at night.

We had 2 garden beds and the chickens happily helped themselves to most of our tomatoes.

We had recently driven Geneveive down to Murfreesboro to give "her" away and we were left with 4 hens.

They were just about at laying age. Which also means they were mating age...which meant every time I bent down to pet them, they would squat into uh, "position" and then ruffle their feathers.

I was unpleasantly surprised to learn this was their mating stance and hoped I was not inadvertently pleasuring my chickens. As if keeping backyard chickens wasn't scandalous enough.

For those of you who are wondering (and for the majority of those who are not) here is a bit of chicken sex ed:

-Just like human females ovulate with every cycle, hens ovulate - almost daily.

-As is the case with human eggs, chicken eggs are the result of that ovulation.

(If you aren't grossed out enough to stop eating eggs, WAIT I've got more!)

-The egg is ovulated and discarded whether or not it gets fertilized.

-The egg MUST be fertilized by a rooster in order to grow a baby chick.

-How this happens, I could care less about and honestly, I don't want to know.

Even with all of this disturbing knowledge, I still longed for a farm fresh egg.

This was all part of the experiment of chicken keeping.

I wanted us to KNOW where the eggs came from, and to be a little more grateful and a little more reverent about our food sources.

It was time to start checking the nesting box for eggs!