I am very happy to report that we are still getting right around a dozen eggs a day. Sometimes we get up to 13 or 15 and other days the girls slack off and only produce 9, but this momma can't complain!
So what do we do with a dozen eggs a day? Often I get egg requests from family and friends. It's a pretty well known fact now in the extended family circle that Becca always has eggs to pass out. In October it was simple. I would stalk pile my hoard throughout the week and take the crop down to Shaw Farms on the weekend and pass them out to family.
Even after the pumpkins have long been disked under and earth freezes over I still have aunts and cousins who will gladly take several dozen at a time off my hands.
There are times when travel is not in any one's plans and I have an egg over-load on my hands. FINALLY after almost an entire year of people telling me to start selling my over stock I decided, why not try it out?
This summer I went to Hobby Lobby and made a cute sign to stick out in the yard whenever I have an abundance in my fridge. (Even if no one stops, maybe they get a smile out of cool sign.)
YES you read that price correctly. $1.00 for farm fresh eggs. They aren't "organic" so I don't feel as if I can charge an arm and a leg. A lady right down the street sells hers for $1.50 and I hear the Amish have raised their prices to $2.00. So I feel like I need to be cheaper than the competition. Plus where I live a lot of people own chickens or know somebody who does. It's a pretty common thing. Not like in the suburbs where fresh eggs are a rare thing. (I have a relative who lives close to Columbus and pays $3.00 a dozen.) Also, the advantage of being married to a grain farmer, I don't pay anything at all towards the feed for my birds. (Thank goodness too! I would not own chickens if I had to buy a bag of chicken feed at TSC for $18.00 a bag!)
Anyhoo, I have come to learn that placing my sign out during the week draws in no business. If I put the sign out on a weekend day, I can sell out in a day. Weird, huh? My biggest customer if my "neighbor" who owns the property next to the field that separates us. She and her husband come out on the weekends and if she sees my sign, she stops in and takes all I have to sell. She has also given me oodles of egg cartons.
Another lady asked me once if I ever needed carton, which I never refuse, and said she's stop in and drop them off. Now one day back in October I was surfing the Internet all dressed up in my sweat pants and a sweatshirt, laying on the couch. It was the middle of the day and I couldn't have felt more like a bum. Actually, I think it was one of those days where I wanted to die. (First trimester of pregnancy, folks. I was so nauseated I couldn't get off the couch.) I'm laying there and I hear someone come up to the front door. Normally people pull in our driveway and use the back door. At first I thought it was the mailman or UPS dropping something off and my first instinct was to grab the computer and run. I didn't want anyone seeing me in my near-death state. So I ran into the kitchen and waited. No one knocked and all seemed quiet again. When I opened the door and went out on the front porch, I started to laugh. There was a stack of egg cartons.
This isn't the first time someone had dropped off cartons and left. In fact, a bag of them ended up on my neighbor's mailbox...someone thinking it was our mailbox.
I think it's funny people are beginning to know me as having chickens and I get these random surprises.
I added the above stack to the supply in the cold room, where we can grab a carton and go collecting, or add it to the stack in the barn because we are always coming home and going straight to the barn!
...cluck... cluck... cluck...
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