I have a thing about Dark Barred Plymouth Rocks.
Adam calls them my bourgeois chickens. (He's very rude.) I think they are particularly pretty.
Anyway, my friend Vanessa and I went halves in an incubator. She's had a couple of runs of it with pretty good success so I thought I'd give it a go. I put a mix of our own Plymouth Rock eggs in as well as some purchased online through Backyard Poultry.
For the first day and a half we used a fancy thermometer, which when checked against a not so fancy one, had the heat up too high. This was probably fatal to my eggs.
Nonetheless I carried on turning them twice a day for twenty days.
Until day twenty, four days ago, when you leave them for a day and hopefully see some shells breaking on day 21.
Nada.
I kicked myself about the thermometer.
I was really quite sad.
Ness said to hold on, give it another day or two.
And then this morning:
Then this afternoon I noticed a number of other eggs with cracks in them. Little beak holes. Oh. My. Goodness. SO EXCITING.
Really, it doesn't matter that we've spent all day tying things down in an astonishing wind. That the spinach is flattened. Or that I feel like I've spent all week wrestling with the accounts for the accountant and our business plan for the bank. We watched a chicken crack open it's shell and come into the world.
Coolest thing ever.
I might have a better set of pictures if I hadn't had Tilly holding onto my arm and shrieking in delight and Henry bouncing up and down on the floorboards behind me.
I'm excited too.
More to come.
xxx
