For the love of Pete, can we please get an egg!!

And now we wait. When will the chickens start laying eggs????  They have food!  They have light!  They have water!  They have 12 different brooding nests to choose from….. let’s go ladies!!  Our lovely rooster leads the way outside every morning and watches out for the ladies all day.  Chuck brings them treats of fruit and veggies from our table scraps, so much so, that they all run out to see him when they see him leave the house.  He has become the chicken whisperer!   But no eggs.  Yet!

Chuck is going to lose his mind waiting for these eggs – so I have to do something to distract him.  Easier than you might think in a small town.  There are a ton of markets and festivals taking place.  One that grabbed our attention was the garlic festival.  Uuuhhhmm…. I like garlic and all, but how is it possible to build a whole festival around just garlic??? Geez… is this where garlic comes from? Given my extremely limited knowledge of anything having to do with cooking, it was entirely possible in my mind. So we all piled into the car and headed out to investigate this “garlic” festival.  Yes, it was all about garlic!  Garlic sauces, garlic spices, garlic butters, pickled garlic, garlic oils….. seemingly 500 different garlic varieties for sale!  We find out that each variety has a different taste, or finish, or heat etc.  Who knew??
Apparently, garlic grows like a hot damn out here… and something called scapes…. everyone goes gaga over scapes.  So, we grab us some sauces, oils and scapes – it’s the thing to do – and also scooped up a few different varieties of garlic. Easy to grow?  Perfect! It may be the only thing we grow successfully!

When we still didn’t have any eggs, the following weekend we headed out to the Road Kings vintage car event. 400 vintage cars lined the streets of downtown Nelson. That night there was a rooftop dance with live music.  It was a gorgeous mild night and the bands were actually really good!  A little city snobbery here for sure….. I need to work on that!

 

 

Soooooo…. still no eggs.  Fallon and Chuck start researching and asking questions from everyone.  What are we doing wrong?  When will our girls start laying their eggs! Information and suggestions start flying in…. you need to make sure they have enough light…. they like red light better….. close in the roosting bins…. keep and eye on their combs and wattles… (what the heck is a wattle?? and what exactly are we supposed to be looking for?)… are they being submissive?  Whew… here I thought it was simple enough… give them a nice house, nice food, nice yard and they pay us back with eggs.  Maybe not. However, I now know that a wattle is their flappy cheeks – the cheeks and their combs apparently get larger and redder when they are ready to start laying… and they will squat down when the rooster or you come near them…… figure it out!

Finally the day arrives!!!   We have our first egg!! Now the hen that laid it appears to have been a little confused on where this was supposed to be laid… it was in the middle of the coop… but we have an egg!  One…. Well, it’s a start!  Slowly over the next few days, the rest of the ladies step up to the plate and the eggs start to roll in… excuse the pun! We lost a few more eggs while the girls were figuring out where to lay them, but in no time at all we were getting an egg a day from each of our ladies.   Chuck is happy… Fallon is happy!  We have completed our first steps to feeding ourselves!  We have managed to make ourselves a breakfast with our own eggs!!!