Short days, the tally sheet, and what the feed really cost

Part 1

What the short days actually do

Sheffield loses a lot of daylight by December. Sunrise is after eight and useful light has gone by about half past three, and my garden faces north-east with a stone wall and a neighbour's sycamore taking another half hour off each end. Hens lay on a day-length signal, and once that signal drops below roughly twelve hours the whole business slows and then stops. It is not illness and it is not the cold, and I spent the first winter checking birds over for problems that were not there.

The moult lands in the same period and makes it look worse. Feathers are largely protein, a full moult is expensive for a bird, and nothing lays while it is rebuilding a coat. My three-year-old hybrid dropped feathers for about five weeks from late September 2023 and looked terrible for three of them. The two older birds moult harder and later each year, so by their third autumn the gap between the last egg of the season and the first of the next ran to just over eleven weeks.

Part 2

The winter I tried a lamp, and why I stopped

In the winter of 2022 I ran a low-wattage lamp on a timer in the shed, set to come on at half past five in the morning and go off when daylight arrived, giving about fourteen hours total. It worked in the narrow sense. Weekly collection through December went from the usual handful to eighteen or nineteen, and I was quietly pleased with myself until February, when two birds went into a hard moult at completely the wrong time of year and one of them did not lay again until May.

The reasoning I have settled on is that the laying year is finite rather than free. A hen is born with a fixed number of follicles and the winter pause is when the reproductive system gets a rest and the bird rebuilds. Borrowing eggs in December means not having them in March, and in my case it meant a bird that was off lay for four months instead of eleven weeks. I have not used a lamp since the spring of 2023. If I ever do it again it will be in a flock where I am prepared to replace birds annually, which is not what this garden is for.

Part 3

The tally sheet, and why it is on the door

The sheet is a sheet of A4 in a plastic wallet on the inside of the shed door, ruled into weeks down the side, with a pencil hanging on a bootlace. Eggs get marked in fives, the old gate-and-post way, as they come in. At the end of the week I write the total in the right-hand column and start a new row. It is the least sophisticated record-keeping imaginable and it is the reason I know anything at all about these birds.

The reason it is on the door rather than in my phone is that it gets filled in while I am holding the eggs, with cold hands, before I have decided whether the number is interesting. A count I would have made later in the kitchen is a count I would have rounded, and the rounding always goes upwards. Three years of sheets also give me a shape to compare against: I know that the first week of November 2023 was fourteen, 2024 was eleven, and 2025 was twelve, so the eight I got in 2026 was worth looking into rather than shrugging at.

Part 4

The feed ledger against the eggs that came in

I keep the feed on the same sheet, because it turns out that guessing at feed is even easier than guessing at eggs. Six hens on layers pellets go through roughly twenty kilos in nine to ten weeks, which is about one hundred and twenty grams a bird a day once you allow for what goes on the floor. That is higher in December and January, partly because cold birds eat more and partly because they are not getting much off the ground. A twenty-kilo sack runs to something in the region of fourteen pounds where I buy it, so the feed year comes out around seventy-five to eighty pounds for the flock.

Against that, 2025 produced nine hundred and eighty-one eggs from six birds, which is eighty-one and a bit dozen. Straight division puts the feed cost somewhere near ninety-five pence a dozen. That figure is honest only if you ignore everything else, and I do not: bedding runs about twenty-five pounds a year, the shed and run cost something to build and will need a roof eventually, and the two weeks of holiday cover I pay back in eggs and favours are not free either. Loaded properly it is nearer two pounds a dozen, which is roughly what good eggs cost anyway.

So the honest accounting is that the hens do not save money and are not far off breaking even on feed alone, which was not the point. They eat the kitchen scraps that are safe for them, they turn the vegetable bed over in February faster than I can with a fork, and the manure heap behind the shed is worth having. The ledger exists to stop me telling myself a nicer story than the sheet supports.

Part 5

What I do now through the dark months

I plan for the gap instead of fighting it. From the middle of October there is a tray of eggs in the cool of the back porch, put by in the weeks when collection is over thirty, and that covers most of December. Nothing gets bought in and nothing gets promised to anyone. The birds get the same pellets, a handful of mixed corn in the late afternoon when it is genuinely cold because it gives them something to work on before roosting, and dry ground under the roofed half of the run so they are not standing in wet all day.

The rest is patience. The first egg of 2025 came on the nineteenth of January, from the youngest bird, and by the first week of February the sheet was back to eleven a week. In 2026 the first came on the twenty-second of January. Three years of sheets means I can now look at an empty row in December and know it is a season rather than a problem, and that knowledge is the single most useful thing the pencil on the bootlace has produced.