Our First Egg!!

Our first egg is the one on the bottom. The one on the top is a grocery store "large" egg for comparison.

I'm so excited! The roosters have been 'violating' the chickens for about a week and a half now, so we knew it must be close to laying time. In fact, today we had to separate the roosters for the first time because they were fighting so badly. We put the smaller one into the goat paddock for the day so that he could free-range. The others we left in the coop/run since it was rainy anyway. When my H went to put the rooster back in, he saw the egg sitting there in one of the nesting box! Thank goodness we got those boxes done last week! This is an egg from one of the two white leghorns. They are supposed to be the most prolific layers of the group, so it makes sense that they'd be the first to lay for us.

This was a busy weekend as usual. We did get the chicken coop waterproofed yesterday. It had been clear for a few days, so the coop was nice and dry and it was supposed to be sunny yesterday and warm enough (barely) to apply the water seal. By the time we'd put the chickens back in, it was dry enough that the fumes were mostly gone. Today, it rained and we could see the water beading up on the coop. Excellent!

We also skimmed more milk and ate the last of the carrots from our garden. And we tried one of the pints of canned carrots with our dinner one night...they were surprizingly good! Not mushy at all...which I was totally expecting. Next weekend I hope to can a batch of something else (I did no canning this weekend). We did get some big beef bones from our CSA, so maybe I'll use those to make some beef stock.

Today we managed to get in a 20 mile ride. It was pouring rain the whole time, but all of our gear served us well and we stayed dry and comfortable. I was actually kind of glad that I got a chance to test everything out (including my fenders) before I have to ride to work one day in the rain. We are both also working on getting back into shape, so a 20 mile ride was a nice workout towards that end.

Lastly, I managed to get the outside of our house decorated. I put up icicle lights hanging from the front porch overhang. Then we put rope lighting as an outline of our roofline. Lastly, I framed the front door with fake evergreen boughs laced with white lights. It all looks nice but isn't too much. I'm not a fan of house decorations that light up the night! Tonight we are putting up our tree. The ceilings in this house are 7ft. The tree is 7.5 ft. Somehow, we'll make it work!