Laying summary – June

For June I’m pleased to say we can report a recovery of sorts, as far as the laying stats are concerned. This month had Frida laying consistently, Bessie intermittently, and finally Poppy back into it at month-end. Hooray!

So there were 35 eggs for the month, and fears of having to purchase them were allayed. (It probably helped that Stewart was away on business for half the month, so the demand for an egg at breakfast was not present.) Here’s the June result in graphical form:

Still no indication of laying from Neroli yet – she’ll probably need the days to start to lengthen a bit before she feels the urge. Claire and Lily look to be recovering well from their moult – Claire in particular now has outrageous comb and wattles! So she shouldn’t be far away. And still we wonder about the two Australorps – they look in good condition, finished moulting ages ago, but aren’t showing any signs of laying yet.

Poppy returns to the lay!

Yes indeedy, after 124 days off moulting, Thumper Poppy has returned to the lay. With quite a lot more fuss than usual – she typically pops the first egg of a sequence out without giving us much notice, but this time she spent about two hours going in and out, wingeing and bitching.

I thought she must be close. She’s been doing her version of the dippy-bird for the last week and a bit (well, her version is more “crouch and stamp frantically” hence the Thumper reference), and she’s coloured up nicely. The worry was that she may have put too much weight on – at 3.8 kg (as of 13.6.09) she’s the heaviest she’s ever been. But no, she produced a lovely, speckled, 63 egg.

Question: how long before she goes broody this time?!!