Harvest Monday

Duck egg at 6 days of incubation

Welcome to Harvest Monday, sponsored by Daphne's Dandelions, this is a great blog hop to share you garden with others from around the world.

This week has been all about eggs. I have some duck and chicken eggs in the incubator and Friday was day 6 for them. The duck eggs are big and white and easy to see into when you candle them. Here you can see the red blob that is the embryo, with the spiderweb of veins that supports it.

Chicken and duck eggs from 2/22/13

I have several breeds and mixed breeds of chickens which are beginning to lay now. The big white eggs are from the Muscovy ducks and the slightly smaller ones are from the Welsh Harlequin. The green and blue ones from the Easter Egger chickens, the brown ones from my Buff Orpingtons, Welsummer and Welsummer crosses.

eggs from 2/23/13

On Saturday my third Easter Egger started laying, a tiny bluish egg, there in the center. The Muscovy girl seems to have rolled her egg through the mud.

eggs from 2/24/13

Today another new girl started laying; a mix between a Cochin and a Rhode Island Red. That tiny egg at the top center is her first one. I am really excited to have such fun eggs! I'll be selling chicks pretty soon and I'll have eggs to sell at the farmer's market this summer.

Snow!

The weather has been really crazy this week. It snowed on Wednesday. Then yesterday it was so warm I was working outside in a t-shirt and this morning it snowed again!

As you can see not much going on in the garden outside right now!

More chickies on the way!

Hatching Eggs

OOPS! boy I didn't realize it's been a couple of weeks! Life has been a bit crazy and time is just flying by! I can't figure out where Aug & Sep went, let alone what happened to Oct!

Well my first incubator hatch came off so successful that I decided to do some more eggs. I bought some that were shipped to me. Shipping lowers the hatch rate because the eggs tend to get scrambled by the PO, even when marked FRAGILE.  The pale green eggs were in a box, marked fragile and one corner of the box was crushed in. The eggs were well packed, each egg individually wrapped in bubble wrap, placed in a smaller box in the center of the big box with more packing between the two boxes. Even so the egg closest to the crushed corner was cracked. The orange blob is some crayon was I melted over the crack to help keep out bacteria, just in case the egg actually was able to grow. Those pale green eggs are from chickens called Easter Eggers, which is not a standardized breed of chicken, but crosses between Ameraucauna and other breeds. Also, Amercauna chickens that are not up to the Standard of Perfection and cannot be shown, are also referred to as Easter Eggers or EEs, even if they are purebred. (confused yet?)

Those dark brown eggs are from French Black Copper Marans, a breed that comes from Marans, France. The darkest of the eggs in this pic are the lightest allowed in the breed and I have seen pictures of some that were so dark they were pushing towards black. 

The 7 light brown eggs are from my banty hens and my big Buff Orpington rooster.  I put all these eggs in the incubator on Oct 25. Today is Day 9. I finally got a really bright LED flashlight to use for candling the eggs. Candling is where you shine a light through the egg so you can see what is going on inside of it. I am still learning to candle, so unless I am really sure the egg is a dud I leave it in the incubator. I'm afraid I will toss one that was actually still good in my inexperience.

scrambled egg

This one was definitely scrambled, that blood ring goes all the way around the egg, pulled 4 EE and 2 Marans that looked like this.

chick embryo

Excuse the fuzzy photos. The camera shutter takes forever because I'm doing this in a very dark room and the fuzzys come from breathing while the shutter is open. Maybe next time I will try to pull out the tripod.

See that red dot in the middle of this one? that's  the head of the embryo, the fainter squiggle below it is it's body. You can also see the network of veins that draw nutrients from the egg yolk to feed the developing chick. This little guy was jumping and swimming all over the place.

Most of the Marans eggs are too dark to candle, but at least one showed definite signs of life. Some of the EEs were also lively and all seven of the banty eggs were jumping for joy!

The eggs are due to hatch November 15. So yea, think we'll end up with chicks in the living room all winter....