Six Figs Farm LLC

If you’ve had farm fresh eggs, you know how varied they can be. You open the carton, and see a tiny egg, a huge egg, and a long skinny egg, all sitting next to each other. A green one sits next to a speckled brown egg.

When you crack them open, you’ll see the deep yellow yolk, you might get lucky and get a double yolker, you might see a small meat spot that got missed in candling. You might even have noticed that the taste and yolk color are different in different seasons. Winter eggs are not Spring eggs. Farm fresh eggs are not even trying to pass themselves off as store bought.

But the question we get asked the most is how our chickens lay such differently colored eggs. Everyone wants to know where the blue and green eggs come from. The simplest answer is genetics.

When we first started with chickens, a few years back, I wanted to have pretty eggs. We started out with Barred Rocks, which lay pinkish-brown eggs, and Easter Eggers, which lay blue, green, or brown. I love opening up a carton of eggs and seeing pretty colors. I don’t want anyone to ever open up a carton of our eggs and mistake them for something that could have been bought at the grocery store.

Different breeds of chickens lay different colored eggs. Now, here comes the answer you were waiting for (drumroll, please). No one really knows why.

It’s possible that chickens that were bred in different areas developed colored eggs that would be camouflaged in the nest, to keep them safe. It’s possible that the different egg colors help the birds recognize their own eggs. I will often come upon color coordinated nest boxes, but to be honest, our hens will lay on any colored eggs and act like they’ve won the lottery. Just like a robin lays a blue egg and some wild birds lay spotted eggs, birds lay eggs in all colors, and nobody really knows why.

There are chickens that lay white, cream, light brown, dark brown, brown with speckles, blue, green and olive green, among others. When you crack them open, they all look the same inside. The pigment is only shell deep.

The color comes from pigment, either laid over the shell, in the bloom (a protective coating that seals the egg and keeps it safe from bacteria), or deposited in the shell itself. It happens when the egg is moving along in the oviduct, on its way out. If the color is in the bloom, it can be scrubbed or scratched off.

What’s your favorite color egg? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for stopping by, and if you’d like to come by and get some of our crazy colored eggs, you can click the link here.

For all of you who are wanting to get your own crazy colored egg laying chickens, here’s your shopping list 😊 Make sure the chickens tolerate the weather in your area. Some do well with heat, others do better with cold. The pretty colors are usually going to mean you get a few less eggs, but if you feed your chickens well, you’ll usually get plenty. I’m only listing chickens we have direct experience with, but there are plenty more.

Dark coffee brown/ brown with speckles: Cucko Marans, Welsummers

Green and blue: Easter Eggers

Medium brown: Cinnamon Queens, Rhode Island Red

Olive green and green with speckles: Olive Eggers

Pinkish Brown: Barred Rocks

For the best info on how to raise chickens, some good books are Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens and The Small Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery.