Six and a Half Eggs

Chickens are very sensitive to the amount of daylight and stop laying as the daylight hours wane. From an evolutionary stand point it makes great sense - you don't want to be hatching a brood in the fury of winter. But from an egg consumer's stand point it sucks - we are still feeding the fowl but they aren't giving us anything in return. Which is why this year we decided to take a cue from commercial farmers and put our chickens under artificial lights to increase production. It seems to be working great - in fact, today we got more than one egg per chicken for the first time ever. Our six* chickens produced six and a half eggs today! Don't believe me? Just take a look!

Six regular eggs and one dwarf egg. The inside is still a mystery!

(* - We used to have seven chickens, but chickens are just about the stupidest things on the planet. We lost ours to a drowning accident. Here we thought it was so down-home country to have the chickens and the cows share a field, but not if the chickens try to swim in the cow trough. Megan is not really aware of this as of yet. We plan to get several more chickens in the spring and then just be like, "Wow, now we have nine!" without emphasizing the math. If she really asks, we'll tell, but she already is creeping us out with all her questions about death, and so we don't really want to feed that flame.)