Small Farming/Homesteading is mostly shoveling Sh#t.... and finding eggs it seems

I am finally finished err caught up on the shit shoveling around here. As anyone who owns livestock can tell you shoveling shit is NEVER finished. In fact I am not sure which chore takes up more time, harvesting, stacking and feeding hay or shoveling shit. Seems I am usually doing one of the two around here. Lately however I been shoveling more shit than anything else.

I took another three loads of manure I pulled out of the equipment shed and spread it on the hay field today. I then put the manure spreader away for a few weeks as I have now managed to get all the manure piles removed. I think I took out 12 loads of manure in the last week and a half.

It was then time to go into the barn and begin the set up for tomorrows sorting and putting the ewes in with the rams. Tomorrow is going to be a day for the record books let me tell you. There will be only two animals on this entire farm happy tomorrow. That would be the two rams. The ewes will be unhappy, the yearlings will be wanting their mommies and the chickens will be upset because their dusting grounds are now full of sheep.

However before tomorrow starts I have to set up the barn for sheep sorting and that includes freeing up two stall doors.

It seems no matter how much stuff I grade out of the barn, no matter how much shit I shovel these two stall doors ALWAYS have their bottoms buried in shit.

So there I was once again shoveling shit and making yet another dung heap.

This time though I had a new supervisor in the form of a chicken named Hennypenny. All the other chickens stay at a respectable distance but this one hen likes to fly up onto my shoulder and get in between me and my work for some reason.

Now I haven't been spending much time in the barn lately. Everything has been outside work but it took me a couple of hours to get everything set up and dug out. While I was in there I heard a couple of hens making their usual egg laying racket and then one of the RhodeIsland reds came out from under an old saddle stand, looked at me and started fussing at me.

"That's kinda odd" I thought.

So I went and had a look see.

There were 22 eggs in a little nook the hens had excavated out next to a hay bale under there.

You could only see the nook if you actually leaned over the old saddle and looked down. The sneaky little tarts were hiding them from me.

I collected up the eggs not being sure how many were good or bad and went back to work shoveling shit.

Pretty soon I heard another hens making that bok bok sound only this time she came running out from under my portable cement mixer. Took one look at me and started squawking like I was trying to eat her or something. Sure enough a little investigating turned up another batch of eight eggs. Another episode like the first two about half an hour later turned up another stash of seven eggs.

Thirty seven eggs in two hours. When I went back to work my mother was checking them in a bucket of water to see how many were good. My suggestion was to just get rid of all of them except the warm ones but she boiled em up and so far they have all been fine. I had two for lunch.

No white or blue eggs in any of the stashes though so I think the little Hamburg hen has her own super secret spot I haven't found yet.

I wonder where they are going to find to lay now that I have discovered their three secret spots?

This free range chicken thing is a bit more worked than I thought although I kinda enjoy searching for the eggs it's like Easter every day!!!!!!

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!!