Eggs In Winter

"EGGS IN WINTER.—The reason hens do not usually lay eggs in the winter is that the gravel is covered up with snow, and therefore they are not furnished with lime to form the shells. If the bones left of meat, poultry, &c. are pounded and mixed with their food, or given to them alone, they will eat them very eagerly, and will lay eggs the same as in summer. Hens fed on oats are much more likely to lay well than those fed on corn."

– Lydia M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832) 

     Our four laying hens laid a whopping five eggs in their first week of laying mid-October; however, after that they stopped.  I don't mean they stopped laying that many eggs in a week's time with the days getting shorter and all.  I mean for a solid month there was absolutely nothing.  It's like they had gone on strike, but still insisted we feed them "the good stuff" every day!  I asked about it on a couple of Facebook groups and pages that I belong to, and the answers that came back were unanimous, and they went something like this:

Might be the time of the year as they slow down in winter.   

Try lighting the coop to give them 12, 14, 16, 17 etc. hours of daylight each day.  (Someone even suggested to light the coop 24/7.)  

Feed them cat food for added protein.

All interesting answers, but as our coop is way out yonder the light was not going to happen without a solar panel (something we don't have the money for right now), I don't buy GMO-free organic cat food, and I was not about to settle for no eggs all winter!  There had to be another way!  

     That's when I figured that I might as well look back onto how others did it historically as there was no artificial lights in the chicken coops of yesteryear.  Mrs. Child gave some awesome advice.  (I don't know why I didn't just go to her first!)  There were two key pieces in her advice: (1) oyster shell or bone meal, and (2) oat-fed birds will lay better than corn-fed.  So I went to check our feed... there was plenty of calcium in the feed, and those first five egg shells were darn sturdy, so I could skip over her first piece of advice, but also, the feed's first ingredient was corn.  

     No wonder our chicken food is so pricey!  GMO-free organic corn is hard to come by in these parts, thus making the feed even more difficult to find.  However, why exactly are we getting something that isn't helping the chickens lay all winter is beyond me, but that's for another day.  

Chowing down on some "chicken porridge"

     The very next morning I walked out to the coop with a "chicken porridge" of three cups of rolled oats from our kitchen cooked in water in the microwave mixed with two cups of our regular feed, and a few vegetable scraps from the previous day's meals that had been stored in the fridge.  I scooped it onto the ground of their runs, and they gobbled it up.  (And, the farm cats insisted on licking out the bucket when I turned my back to change the chickens' waterers.)  

     The next day there were two eggs in the laying boxes.  I gave them regular feed and scraps that day, and the next day "chicken porridge," followed by another day of regular feed and scraps, and so on, alternating between the two.  Every day since then (aside from two) there has been two eggs in the laying boxes.  Our anomaly days, there was just one egg.  

     More recently, I have been cutting back on the amount of oats given, and mixing in more days of regular feed and scraps to try and find the perfect medium; however, as a historian, I am excited to say that fortunately historical advice sometimes pays off, and we are finally getting eggs (45 as of yesterday) from happy chickens in these brisk temperatures we've been struggling with without having to plague the poor birds with lights.