(Note: I was about to post this in "General" but the new board reorganization showed me a better place... woohoo!!)
Yesterday eggchel (one of our wonderful mods) came by the house to hang out and trade some stuff. She asked me if one of my hens was still laying. I told her I had no idea since all the eggs look pretty similar to one another and I'm not that attentive to them (to see who's on the nest when).
This got me to thinking... if each hen laid a different color egg then I could tell who was laying when!
In the past I've had to balance out what I wanted and what my wife wanted in our chickens. It came down to the following when we were first planning:
egg quantity
friendliness
prettiness
confinement / foraging / economical eater / etc.
Well, that's all fine and good, but then you're limited to availability of chicks and so here with are with our hodge podge of 7 adult hens (seen in my signature) and two new baby Silver Laced Wyandotes
So, let's say I was going to start over and want 5 - 8 hens (I'm in the city, remember) and could pick any breeds in the world. Well, using my favorite breed chart (http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html) I picked the following breeds:
Ameraucana - blue
Delaware - medium brown
Faverolles - creamy
Marans - dark brown
Rhode Island - medium brown
Sussex - creamy
Remember, this list is based on the requirements above AND my new requirement of different colored eggs from each hen. I have two medium brown and two creamy layers. I couldn't find a white layer that had a lot of eggs and was friendly / not flighty.
What do you think? What should be added / taken away based on what we'd like for our perfect flock of diverse egg layers?
Yesterday eggchel (one of our wonderful mods) came by the house to hang out and trade some stuff. She asked me if one of my hens was still laying. I told her I had no idea since all the eggs look pretty similar to one another and I'm not that attentive to them (to see who's on the nest when).
This got me to thinking... if each hen laid a different color egg then I could tell who was laying when!
In the past I've had to balance out what I wanted and what my wife wanted in our chickens. It came down to the following when we were first planning:
egg quantity
friendliness
prettiness
confinement / foraging / economical eater / etc.
Well, that's all fine and good, but then you're limited to availability of chicks and so here with are with our hodge podge of 7 adult hens (seen in my signature) and two new baby Silver Laced Wyandotes
So, let's say I was going to start over and want 5 - 8 hens (I'm in the city, remember) and could pick any breeds in the world. Well, using my favorite breed chart (http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html) I picked the following breeds:
Ameraucana - blue
Delaware - medium brown
Faverolles - creamy
Marans - dark brown
Rhode Island - medium brown
Sussex - creamy
Remember, this list is based on the requirements above AND my new requirement of different colored eggs from each hen. I have two medium brown and two creamy layers. I couldn't find a white layer that had a lot of eggs and was friendly / not flighty.
What do you think? What should be added / taken away based on what we'd like for our perfect flock of diverse egg layers?