we bought a farm...continued

I bet we have all heard the question ask "which came first..the chicken or the egg?"
In my opinion..I have been known to be wrong.. but in Genesis ch.2 verse 19 it tells us that the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.....It tells us here that God formed every beast and bird from the ground..I would gather from that He formed the chicken, not the egg. The egg is the way chickens are hatched..providing there is a rooster in the pen..We could have a conversation about reproduction here and now but that isn't exactly what this article is about.
Sooo, back to the farm and my article on chickens this time. As I have said in previous articles, Leland wanted to have ALL the animals that God created come live with us in Grayson county..maybe not all but a lot..
We did get some old hens and a rooster..because we did want to hatch chickens. A small hen house was already here and we got our flock and was on the journey to our own eggs and fried chicken..We both remembered from our limited childhood days on the farm that our mother's marked the eggs that were to be 'set'..When an old hen started 'clucking' that meant she was ready to set on some eggs. We would then mark a number of eggs for her to set on. Other hens would get in the same nest with her and lay an egg and we would retrive those but left the marked ones alone. When  you gathered the eggs it was nice if you could do that chore when the old hen was off the nest for a little while..she did not take kindly you invading her nest.It took 21 days for the eggs to hatch and during that time the hen would turn the eggs over instead of leaving them in the same position all time.People who used incabators had to turn the eggs every so often. After the chicks hatched you would see the hen and her little chicks scratching in the yard and she would be clucking to them all time. I guess they understood her, we didn't. One thing so very interesting in watching the hen and her chicks was if the mother hen suspected some danger. She may have seen  a cat in the area or maybe even thunder she would start clucking in an alarming way and little chicks would come running and gather under her wings and she would lower herself over them. I do believe she would protect them with her life.
As the hens got older they didn't lay much and it was then that chicken and dressing showed up on many tables.
As time went on and we saw that if having a few chickens could be good then just think what 500 would do. For one thing it meant a lot more work and lot more feed to buy. We got them anyway. Ordered 500 baby chickens..just wanted pullets didn't want any roosters..we weren't interested in fertlized eggs..just wanted a lot of eggs to sell. In the 500 we ordered we recieved 25-30 extra to account for the roosters that would be in the bunch. When these got large enough that we coud tell were roosters and big enough to fry ..we had fried chicken..I put a lot in the freezer.
A few months after we got the little chicks they started laying eggs..what a sight and how happy we were.The new wore off when we were getting almost 400 eggs a day.
We had different places that bought the eggs and of course a lot of friends and relatives got free eggs..If you want to hear horror stories of washing eggs, just ask Sharon.

Proverbs 19: 15
Laziness casts one into a deep sleep,
And an idle person will suffer hunger.