How do you look after yours?

[Ravenxxx]

How do peeps look after their eggs once they are laid??

Do you remove the straight away onc the hens have laid?

Where do you store them?

When is the best time to eat them?

How long do they last?

Shoud you replace the eggs with dummy ones?

Anyone else like me and cant quite eat one of my hens eggs, i do try but can face it!! or am i crackers?? or is this a new owner thing?

 

[bigzio]

Raven, If you like eggs, your gonna love the taste of these. The yolks stand up proud and the whites don't run all over.
It's ok to eat them right away. I collect eggs twice daily cause I'm here and it keeps other hens from breaking eggs by accident entering and leaving the nest.

Store bought eggs can be 4 weeks old before they even hit the shelf, so they will last quite a long time at home. I simply check the eggs to make sure they are clean and place in egg cartons and store in the fridge.

I collect around a dozen a day and have 10 doz in the fridge right now, making none of them even 2 weeks old. Family and friends will be picking them up, some need 2 doz at a time and some need 3, so they go fast.

Really fresh eggs if used for hard boiled may be hard to peel, so if they are a couple weeks old they work better. Enjoy them they are better for you than the eggs that come from mistreated commercial hens. I won't even give them my buisness.

bigzio

 

[Marion]

I get about 20 eggs a day from my RIR hens and just like bigzio it is rare to find any in the fridge that are more than a week old! People love fresh eggs and almost all of them will tell me after getting their first taste of a fresh egg that the ones at the grocery store are just blah! The only time that I do have grocery store eggs is when I need to boil and peel them because fresh eggs just will not peel right and make some ugly deviled eggs! I collect mine every afternoon because we work and can't be home during the day to get them any sooner. I don't think replacing the eggs with dummy ones is necessary unless you are trying to encourage them to lay in a specific place or wanting to get a hen to go broody. Some folks leave fresh eggs out on the countertop but I prefer to refridgerate mine right away unless I intend to incubate them. Try one of yours Raven... you will be pleased I am sure!

 

[cockadoodlemom]

Raven when you get past the toughts your having you will never want a store bought egg again. And if your boiling them try to put some salt in the water and they peel with ease.

 

[keljonma]

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[Barnyard Dawg]

We collect our eggs through out the day when time permits. We store our eggs out of the refrigerator in an open crate in a cool shaded area. Then transfer them to a carton when we get too many they will keep for a couple of months but never seem to last that long. The eggs are very clean since we keep the nesting boxes clean and don’t need to wash them so we don’t remove that protective layer on the eggs. We just give them away when we get too many. The eggs are delicious what can I say, you would never what to go back to store bought.

 

[chickbea]

I used to feel a bit guilty about taking my girls' eggs to eat - here's how I got over it:

1. They are going to lay an egg whether I take it or not - so why let it go to waste?
2. Commercial hens are the most abused and factory farmed critters out there. The life of a battery cage hen must be utterly intolerable. By raising your own hens, you are refusing to take part in a barbaric industry.
3. There is just something very cool about taking care of an animal and having it give something back to you. I look at it as a reciprocal arrangement - I give them great care, and they give me great food!

 

[TheBigWRanch]

Quote:
My mom and I prefer store bought eggs. To me they look sterile, almost as if made by a machine. Fresh eggs just scream GERMS! to me. Something about knowing it came out of a chickens butt and rolled around in a filthy coop that disturbs me... With store bought eggs I am able to be in denial about where they really came from. A couple of times my dad has snuck our fresh eggs in without telling us, and I have to say that I never have tasted a difference between fresh and store bought, so in my opinion, you aren't missing a thing if you would rather buy store bought eggs. I don't think it is a new owner thing, I've had chickens for over ten years, and still don't eat them.

 

[Ravenxxx]

Oh great tips folks thank you!!

Ill carry on collecting mine twice a day and puting them in the cartons until ive made a full box. Would like one of mine to go broody so we can hatch some babies without a noisey roo upsetting the neighbour, So ill carry on putting in the dummy eggs and see whats happens.

Do you think free range hens are less likely to go broody than caged hens, with the freedom to go out and forget about the egg?

Love the idea Chickbea of making a cake with the girls eggs ill do that this weekend for defo and maybe share a few crumbs with my girls too

 

[SpottedCrow]

In the summer I can collect as soon as Obelisk lays because she makes so much noise she could wake the dead. Penny's so quiet that you have to reach under her to see if there's an egg.
Both of my birds are house chickens, but they go out when it's nice and I'm home to watch them and they freerange then. I don't think keeping them in or letting them out make any difference in broodiness.
I love to eat my girls' eggs. I agree with Chickbea on this point. We feed, take care and love them and they give us eggs in return.