When hens quit laying, what do you do? Back in the fall, my girls suddenly quit laying. One day they were laying, and the next day they just quit. Just like that. In fact, my girls didn’t lay anything for the next four months. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. It was like they all gave me the bird at the same time. Pun intended. And they quit talking to me, they weren’t cackling at all.
I had to figure out what was going on. Not laying meant no eggs, and I refuse to buy eggs. Luckily, I had water glassed some eggs prior to my girls going on strike, so I was able to make it through. I’ll talk about water glassing in another post. But what caused them to quit laying to begin with?
After a little bit, I started to think that maybe I had stressed them out. That’s a thing, right? Chickens can be stressed too. I had just added a new rooster and a new hen into the mix, so maybe they just weren’t compatible, maybe this was their way of saying, “Look mama, we’re not laying one more egg until you get these two out of here.”
I tried everything I could think of. The newbies were still getting used to things in the coop, so I would let my ladies out to free range everyday so they could be by themselves. I gave them extra laying crumbles, talked to them, gave them encouraging words about laying eggs, basically begged them to start laying again, and still… nothing.
One day, the light came on. I felt like one of those cartoon characters that have a huge lightbulb over their heads. I wasn’t feeding my girls the feed that had been in the news, but what if the feed I was using was lacking something, or maybe some ingredient had to be changed to something else or left out entirely? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, sometimes I’m just a little late to the game.
For the next couple of weeks, I fed my girls nothing but human food. Whatever we ate, they ate the leftovers. I cooked them beans and pasta and oatmeal, made them rice, baked them bread, and an amazing thing started happening. Their feathers started to look better, they started cackling again, and lo and behold, one day I found an egg in a nesting box. It was just one egg, but it was a start. For an informative list of things chickens can and cannot eat, check out this amazing post from a fellow Tennessean: What Not to Feed Chickens: 33 Foods to Avoid – Backyard Chicken Project
Now they’re back to laying on a regular basis and cackling like nobody’s business. Whatever the chicken feed wasn’t providing my girls, the table scraps did. What about you? Have your hens ever quit laying, and what did you do?