Chocolate Eggs

 

First off, I just want to thank everyone who participated and left comments on my Caption Contest post. They were all good. I chose Nuzzling Muzzles as the winner because she made me laugh the loudest. Her caption was creative, too.

But I also really liked Flartus’s comment, too. A year ago I made a post very similar to her soap opera inspired comment ‘All My Chickens’, called ‘As the Coop Turns’, so her caption was just great. I have a little literary prize for Flartus, too. And Nuz Muz, let me know if you’d like a scarf to go with the hat I made you last winter, girlfriend!

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Now onto the post related to the title above…….   

For a while there I thought one of our Welsumer chicks was a rooster. She was bigger than the other Welsumer chick and she was more aggressive. She was also very independent and would rather roost in the apple tree inside the chicken coop, instead of inside the chicken house with all the other chickens.

I’m relieved that my suspicions were wrong, though. Because apparently Wanda, whose name has now been changed to Hershey, is most definitely a hen…..

A hen who lays lovely chocolate eggs. Hershey has given us five chocolate eggs over the past week. You can see her first two below.

The first chocolate wonder was tiny, as you can see. And the second egg was much bigger. I placed them beside our Rhode Island Red’s brown egg and one of our Easter Egger’s blue-green eggs for comparison.

 

I should have realized that Hershey was just older than the other two chicks, including the other Welsumer chick and the Cuckoo Marans chick that I brought home at the end of August, from the Poultry Swap.

Recently, instead of running away when I try to pet her, Hershey squats down and ‘presents herself’ to me, as if I was a rooster. That’s the first sign that a chicken has moved past the pullet stage into an official egg laying hen.

    

The other Welsumer pullet, we’ve decided to name Cocoa, and we can’t wait until she lays her first chocolate egg so we can compare it to Hershey’s eggs.

Our third chocolate egg layer is the Cuckoo Marans pullet, who has been named Snickers (do you get the theme here? Are you hungry yet?), will probably start to lay around the same time as Cocoa, and it will be interesting to compare the egg color and shade of chocolate between the Welsumer and the Cuckoo Marans.

It’s also interesting to compare the differences between the Cuckoo Marans and the Barred Rock, as in the photo above. I used to think the two breeds looked the same, but when placed together, it’s easy to see the differences in their feathering.

Some have asked why eggshell color matters. And it’s true, egg color on the outside doesn’t affect the taste of the egg inside. But to many folks, a brown egg means farm-grown, not store-bought. Case in point, I have one hen, a Brown Leghorn, that lays a single, huge white egg every day. The White Leghorns are the breed of hen that are used in production/factory-farming because they are such reliable egg layers, but sometimes when I have included a couple of my Brown Leghorn’s extra-large, white eggs in a carton for sale, I’ll get a customer that asks me, “Why did you put a store-bought egg in there?”

So, now I keep those big, tasty white eggs for my family and only sell the brown or blue/green eggs to my customers. And that is why I added some new brown egg layers to my flock this year. The darker the eggs, the better.