Many people raise chickens to enjoy healthy eggs. I know that’s what got us started. And even more fun is to have a colorful egg basket—without dying!
Many first-time chicken keepers are unaware that different breeds of chickens lay different colored eggs. Without any dyeing, you can have a colorful Easter basket year round! Our grandchildren love to identify the breeds that their breakfast eggs came from by the colors.
At Storybook Farm, we work hard on mating our heritage breed cocks and hens to produce birds better than they are, following the APA Standard of Perfection (SOP). But, there’s a time to get less serious and just have fun! We happen to have heritage breeds that lay bluish eggs, dark chocolate eggs, and deep tan eggs. From these breeds, one can cross them to get a hen that will lay what are commonly called “Easter eggs” and “olive eggs.” The cross-bred hens are correspondingly called “Easter Eggers” and “Olive Eggers.” The reason that breeding these birds is “not serious” is because Easter Eggers (EEs) and Olive Eggers (OEs) are not recognized as breeds by the APA. But, it sure is fun to have those different colored eggs in your basket each week!
So, what breeds do you combine to get Easter and olive egg colors? For OEs, you need a breed that gives dark brown eggs: Marans and Welsummers are popular choices for this element. And you need a breed that lays a blue, or blue green egg: most often, and Ameraucana. For EEs, you want to start with a tan egg (many breeds lay this kind), and cross it with a blue or blue green egg. The resulting color will be more of a true green than an olive color.
It does not matter if the cock or the hen are of the two breeds you are mixing. You can put an Ameraucana cock over a Marans hen, or vice versa. The resulting hens from these interbreeding can be quite lovely. They almost always have cute muffs around their faces (from their Ameraucana genes) and their feather colors can be all over the place. And, you can develop egg colors still further by breeding successive generations of mixed breeds. The chart at the left gives you ideas of how they can develop, as does the photo below.
Here at Storybook Farm, we have Black Copper Marans (who lay dark brown eggs), Ameraucanas (who lay the blue eggs), and Light Sussex, who lay differing tan colored eggs. (See a sample of our eggs in the photo at the start of this article.)
If you are interested in purchasing either hatching eggs or chicks, we can accommodate you with a special order. Please see our Shop for details on orders of this kind.
When there is no blue gene present in the pair, any black markings will be normally colored (i.e. they will appear black)
The first hurdle was, as is so often the case, legalities. I consulted the 
It took me a couple of weeks to get all these ducks in a row.
Chicks and hatching eggs that carry these avian diseases can threaten not only flocks to whom they come, but humans as well. Responsible farmers who sell chicks seek to make sure that the birds they mail are healthy. So, what is the process in becoming certified NPIP and AI clean?
Part of the reason is that I’m definitely not the inheritor of my grandmother’s award-winning green thumb. When we got here, the first thing we did was plant an orchard, and that spring, we cleared and terraced and fenced an 1800 square foot garden. For two seasons, we worked with the soil that was there naturally; very little grew. The next two seasons, we built raised beds and used the square foot gardening method. Things came up, but then came the rabbits to eat the tender bean shoots, and the deer finished off the tomatoes just when they were getting ripe after so many days of watering and weeding. That was the last straw for me as a gardener: I’ve been happily buying other people’s veggies ever since. (I do wish that we could grow cilantro, though, in the winter, especially. I use it a lot, and our local grocery store can’t keep it in stock because many people in our small town haven’t yet discovered it and it goes bad. Sigh.)
Then, I bought an incubator. And I was so terrified that it would break mid-hatch that I bought a second one just to have as a backup. My first hatching season wasn’t so great. I had 50% hatches, mostly. But the chicks were so cute! (In the picture at the right, you can see my grandson watching a hatching chick long distance via FaceTime.) It has been so much fun to watch the fascination that the children have with both hatching and the cute little chicks. They even like helping with morning and evening feeding and watering when they’re here.