Eggs are collected daily, then washed and stocked first thing the next morning.
May–September: We stock eggs every morning except Tuesday. Wednesday morning's stocking includes eggs laid Monday and Tuesday. All other mornings, the eggs are from the day before.
October–April: We stock Friday–Monday. Friday morning includes eggs laid Monday–Thursday, so it's the week's largest stocking.
Our eggs usually sell out the day they're stocked. During higher April-May production, Friday's eggs occasionally last into Saturday.
Since our eggs aren't prepackaged, they don't come with a laid or packed date. You can use the date of purchase to determine how old your eggs are based on the stocking info above. Most of the year, the eggs you buy were laid the day before.
Yes. We wash our eggs and keep them refrigerated.
You may have heard that leaving an egg unwashed preserves its natural protective bloom. That's true. In our flock, though, about 90% of the eggs have at least a speck of dirt or debris on them. Carefully inspecting every surface of every egg to separate the few completely clean eggs would add considerable handling time, so we choose to wash them all using hot water and friction and then keep them refrigerated.
Our eggs are at their absolute best during that first fresh week, but they'll keep refrigerated for up to 45 days from when they were laid. You can use your purchase date and the stocking schedule above to figure out the earliest possible date your eggs were laid.
Our hens spend their days outside, and we don't use supplemental lighting to maintain egg production. Day length, molting, heat, rain, and other seasonal conditions all affect how many eggs they lay.
We also keep our hens well past their commercial prime, when egg production naturally declines with age. The graph below shows the typical seasonal pattern for our naturally lit, mixed-age flock.
