You may have noticed…it’s egg time. Chocolate eggs, decorated eggs, dyed eggs. They are everywhere!

I just came up from the basement where I saw the coolest eggs ever. These eggs, warmed to nearly 100 degrees in a little incubator, have veins on the inside. Which means, of course, that little chickens are beginning to form. I’m as excited as a kindergartner to see new life take shape.

This was supposed to be a simple thing. We have a hen who sometimes wants to sit on eggs and hatch them. She went “broody” twice this year, but we thought it was too  cold to let her become a chicken mama. We told her she could hatch after April 1. I got a little private condo all ready for her. I was so sure she’d go broody again any moment, I ordered some fertilized eggs of a rare breed I wanted in our flock. I was going to stick them under her and get her to hatch them. The eggs arrived, but she was out of the mood to set.

So I did Robyn-Logic. Rather than let that investment to go to waste, I spent more money buying an incubator to hatch the ordered eggs. And then, since there was lots of room in the incubator, I bought some more eggs, and added even more from our own flock.

And last night, after six days in the incubator, I candled the eggs to see if there were signs of life. To candle them, I used an intense flashlight to illuminate them in a dark room. Not all showed signs of life, but many did. Two fingernail-biting weeks to go.

Anyone else out there hatching eggs or have chicks? Should I try to set up a hatch-cam for the big day? Or am I the only one who didn’t get to see it in kindergarten?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 8:04 am and is filed under Chickens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.