From reading posts here, I expected the hens to slack off laying over the winter (if you can call south florida winter instead of just a really pleasant summer).
And they did slack off some.
I'm down to three hens now (thanks to the dog next door) and they were laying 3 eggs a day, then 2 eggs a day, then 1 egg a day. No real schedule. More often than not, 2 eggs in the basket. Now I'm lucky to see 1 egg a day.
Lately, I've noticed several incidences of those rock-hard not so smooth eggs, with the whitish section on the shell that tells me the eggs got stuck in the poor hen for a longer than necessary period of time.
I'm seeing this sometimes twice per week!
I feed them Layena on demand, scratch grains in the AM, and cantaloupe rinds (they pick out what's left of the fruit and eat the seeds) or tomatoes in the afternoon, plus they usually go out every day or so (LOTS of rain here, plus mosquitoes the size of tennis balls because of all the rain) and eat worms and grass.
What could be missing from their diet that is making such a problem with egg laying? It takes more than a week to get one dozen eggs from the girls!
It is almost like they never recognized that "winter" was over.
Is this a diet thing, or something else?
My dh says we should buy a bale of alfalfa for them, maybe there's something special in there because we used to get one egg per hen daily when we did that.
What do you think?
Thanks!
And they did slack off some.
I'm down to three hens now (thanks to the dog next door) and they were laying 3 eggs a day, then 2 eggs a day, then 1 egg a day. No real schedule. More often than not, 2 eggs in the basket. Now I'm lucky to see 1 egg a day.
Lately, I've noticed several incidences of those rock-hard not so smooth eggs, with the whitish section on the shell that tells me the eggs got stuck in the poor hen for a longer than necessary period of time.
I'm seeing this sometimes twice per week!
I feed them Layena on demand, scratch grains in the AM, and cantaloupe rinds (they pick out what's left of the fruit and eat the seeds) or tomatoes in the afternoon, plus they usually go out every day or so (LOTS of rain here, plus mosquitoes the size of tennis balls because of all the rain) and eat worms and grass.
What could be missing from their diet that is making such a problem with egg laying? It takes more than a week to get one dozen eggs from the girls!
It is almost like they never recognized that "winter" was over.
Is this a diet thing, or something else?
My dh says we should buy a bale of alfalfa for them, maybe there's something special in there because we used to get one egg per hen daily when we did that.
What do you think?
Thanks!
