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Today we would like to introduce you to Henrietta. Henrietta is currently our only Olive Egger chicken, and she is such a beauty. As the title of this blog suggests, Henrietta lays olive green eggs. When selling our eggs, our customers always seem a bit more excited when they see a green egg in the carton. Memories of Dr. Seuss perhaps, or the fun of something different and new. What ever the reason, they leave with a smile every time.
The trick to producing a green egg is by mating a dark brown egg layer, such as a Maran, Welsumers or Barnevelder, with a blue egg layer, like Ameraucanas, Cream Legbars or Araucanas.
The fact is, Olive Eggers are not actually a stand alone breed of chicken and are referred to as hybrids. You will see Olive Eggers with various different looks as this is determined by which breeds mentioned above are mated together. Our wonderful Henrietta is a beautiful smokey gray as you can see from the picture and she always stands out in the coop. I am guessing she may have Ameraucana in her genes, but we are not completely sure.
Henrietta was one of the original six chicks we purchased at Tractor Supply. If you read our first post, you know we kept our little chicks in our closet in a big tote. In case you are wondering, our closet is a fairly large walk in. It was unknown to us how fast the little birds grow and boy did they. In a matter of weeks, we would come home and find that they had started jumping out of the tote and would explore our closet. We would find them sleeping in our shoes, perched on a lower shelf, or hiding behind objects we had stored on the floor. We quickly realized that the coop we were taking our time to build needed to be done a lot faster. We wanted to make sure we had plenty of room in the coop and the run for these sweet little birds, so we built it 9 ft wide by 28 ft long, and inside those dimensions is a 9 ft by 5 ft hen house. Over the next few days we devoted all of our extra time to getting the roof on the hen house and the walls up with chicken wire. We ended up using the chicken wire with 1inch openings and it has worked out really well.
We were in such a haste to get the coop completed enough to where we could move the growing chicks outside. So, we figured that not having a roof on the run wouldn't matter much in the beginning. We figured that as long as we had a roof on the hen house it would be fine, at least temporarily. Being new to raising chickens, we were only thinking about the possibility of them flying over the wall and getting away. We didn't think so much about what could get in the coop. Unfortunately, the reason Henrietta is our only Olive Egger, is because we had left the chickens out one evening longer than expected, and a possum had climbed over the wall and got the other one. It was a sad night for us and we learned a valuable lesson. Thankfully, there was a bond built by those first six chicks that still exists today. The remaining five still sleep together in the hen house and are never very far from each other during the day.
B. F. F. s
Today, Henrietta is one of our strongest egg producers nearly producing eggs everyday, and over the last month she has done just that. Typically, Oliver Eggers produce anywhere from 180 to 200 eggs a year and it seems Henrietta is well on her way.
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