First egg...!!!

We found our first egg in the chicken coop yesterday afternoon! Hooray! I guess that means we're "official" now.

The coop is in a state of transformation right now as we've removed all of the wooden wine boxes and burned them. Turns out that while the wood crates looked pretty cool, open top roosting boxes simply aren't practical for raising chickens. Apparently, if the chickens aren't busy laying eggs, they prefer to spend their time perching and pooping. And with no tops on the boxes, the boxes were quickly being filled with poop. And the fact that they were screwed into the wall made them difficult to take off and clean.

So we've now purchased a commercial grade steel and plastic nesting station with 6 stalls with removable floors. And the roof is sloped; discouraging perching on top. So while I'm in the garage yesterday afternoon putting this thing together and freezing my fingers off, my wife shows me the egg she just found in the coop.

Its brown and pretty tiny - maybe half the size of an egg you'd get in a grocery store. But we're pretty excited about it. The chickens are a week shy of 6 months old; the age at which they are supposed to start laying. I guess I'll spend my afternoon affixing the new roosting set-up to the wall. Hopefully we'll have plenty of more eggs soon!