Hatching and brooding - Housing - Feeding & health - Incubator hire - DIY brooders Greenmeadow PoultryNew for this season: Incubator for hire, with 10 hatching eggs - £50
Purebred Barnevelders from a good laying strain will produce around 200-220 eggs each hen per year and the cockerels make a good killing weight of about 7lb after about six months. Barnevelder eggs are dark brown. They are a good-tempered, friendly breed suitable as garden hens and our birds come up and eat out of our hands.
I would recommend them as the ideal smallholder's bird, or for someone starting with chickens for eggs and/or meat.
The Small PrintEggs will be labelled 'Fragile' and sent in a polystyrene egg-travelling box, additionally wrapped to help protect them from shocks if the parcel is dropped .I feel that this gives the yolks a better chance of staying intact during the journey and the best chance of hatching - although the polyboxes are very good at keeping the shells whole, there is a theory that any shocks to the box are transferred directly to the inside of the egg. Wrapping the box in an extra layer is supposed to help prevent that. For the same reason I now only send eggs 'Special Delivery', which means that they do not go in the bag with the rest of the post (as recorded delivery does) and therefore are handled more gently. If you hatch cockerels and don't want to keep them, I will take them back and cull them, but no refund will be made.
Eggs will be less than seven days old when they arrive with you. I check fertility regularly through the season but as always when eggs have been through the postal system, fertility cannot be guaranteed.
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