Graphing Eggs

Welcome back!

Thank you so much for bringing me containers for milk! You'll see later why I needed so many. 

This week I'm going to show you my graph. I hope you made a graph, too.

Here is my graph.
Does yours look the same, or different from mine?
I counted the eggs I collected each week, then entered the data into my graph.

Did you notice that there are only three bars on the first week? That's because the little grey chickens hadn't started laying their eggs yet.

There aren't very many duck eggs, or small eggs because we only have one duck, and we only have two small chickens.

Did you notice that week 1 has the fewest eggs? That's because I only counted eggs for 5 days that week, not 7 days.

I thought you might like to see what my tracking paper looks like.
This is how I collected the data and kept track of it each day.
The graph above looks muck nicer!

I collected 564 eggs over 5 weeks.
There are 12 eggs in each dozen.

564 ÷ 12 = 47 dozen eggs

The food we buy for the chickens costs about 20¢ per pound. The chickens and duck ate about 125 lbs of food during the 5 weeks I was counting eggs.

20¢ x 125 = $25

To find out how much each dozen eggs cost I divided $25 by 47 dozen eggs.

$25 ÷ 47 dozen = 53¢ for each dozen eggs.

We didn't add the cost of water, or the cost of heating the water in the winter. Our eggs cost more in the winter because it costs more to keep the water warm. Chickens also eat more in the winter because it's cold. It also takes us time to collect and clean the eggs. And it takes time to feed and water the chickens, and to clean their pen. 

If you buy eggs from the store you have to pay for all of those things, too, not just the chicken feed. You need to pay for the carton, and for a place for the chickens to live. You also have to pay someone to bring the eggs to the store!

In the spring and summer the chickens eat less food because they like to eat bugs and grass in the pasture. We're glad that the chickens eat so many bugs!

Here's a link to last years post on graphing eggs.

I thought you might like to see what we put in our nesting boxes.
Plastic Easter eggs!
The plastic eggs let the chickens know that this is a good place to lay eggs.
We still have to look all over for eggs because chickens like to hide their eggs.
Silly chickens!

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Do you see something different about River's front legs?
What's missing?
Her splint! We took it off on Monday and her right front leg is strong and straight!

One other thing that's different in the picture is that River is eating from her mom. Last week I showed you drinking a bottle. Usually when a kid starts with a bottle they won't eat from their mom.

I think River is very smart because she learned how to eat from her mom! We still give her a bottle or two every day to make sure she gets enough to eat, and because it's fun to feed a goat kid with a bottle.

I thought you might like to see what it looks like when a goat kid eats from her mom.

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I thought you might like to see what our refrigerator looks like.
Echo gives a lot of milk!
That's why we need so many containers!
Echo fills between 4 and 5 gallon containers every day.
The chickens lay a lot of eggs!

Do you see the yellow stuff at the top of the containers? That's cream! We can shake the container of milk and it mixes in. Yummy, creamy milk!

If we want just cream then we skim it off the top to make butter and ice cream.

This is something I'm very excited about.
It doesn't look like much.
We thought this tree died during the winter.
But it didn't! It's growing a new branch from the trunk.
I think it's because I pour about 5 gallons of water on it every day.
We don't like wasting water so when we're done cleaning the milker
we pour the water on this tree, and the garden.

This tree will grow very tall and provide a lot of shade for the animals. We don't have air conditioning in the barn so we like to make sure they have some place to get out of the sun in the summer time.

If you scroll back up to the tracking page you'll see that I wrote a note on the paper by Mon 28. That's when the turkey hen started sitting on her eggs.

Turkey's usually hatch out their eggs in about 25-28 days. How many days has it been since she started sitting?

I hope you have a great week!