Perpetual Laying

POULTRY YARD.

To Make Hens Lay Perpetually.—We find the following in an English paper, and transfer it to our paper without vouching for its correctness.

Keep no roosters; give the hens fresh meat, chopped up like sausage meat, once a day —a very small portion, say half an ounce a day, to each hen —in winter, or from the time insects disappear in the fall till they appear again in the spring.

Never allow any eggs to remain in the nest for what are called nest eggs. When the roosters do not run with the hens and no nest eggs are left in the nest, the hens will not cease laying after the production of twelve or fifteen eggs, as they always do when roosters and nest eggs are allowed, but continue laying perpetually.

 If the above plan were generally adopted, eggs would be as plenty in winter as in summer. One reason why hens do not lay in winter as freely as in summer is the want of animal food which they get in summer in abundance m the form of insects.

===update.  50 or 60 years later in The Call of the Hen, Walter Hogan an who claims that he gets 300 eggs a year says exactly the same thing.

You can read it here on Google Books, but to be honest, skip to the charts at the end and save yourself  time as now there are Golden Comets, Black Stars, Red Sexed Links and Leghorns that do this for you without going through all the bother.

  I imagine 100 years when Leghorns were expensive and not yet perfected, Hogan's book was worthwhile; now you can buy an every day layer at Tractor Supply in the Spring and wait about 5 months and there you go.  His book is good for reminding you that small skinny hens lay the most; my Sussex hens are good layers but they are bred for dual purpose.

A real egg layer has one purpose and that's to lay eggs.  But beware, chickens are born with all the eggs that they are going to lay in their cloaca and most of those will never be laid.  The real test of a good layer is their clutch -- how long they keep laying in successive.  But that comes at a price, and after 2 years or so, many run dry.  The best layers I have found, are Golden Comets, white sexed links.

Tractor Supply did not have them this Spring, jsut the Red, but most of the big hatcheries always do like Ideal, Hoffman Hatchery, here in Pennsylvania and Murray McMurray to name a few.  Remember when ordering your birds, get them as close to where you live as possible; it's easier on the chicks.