Fresh egg display board

Part of the fun of having backyard chickens is daily egg collecting.  It has been five years since we brought our first chicks home.  During that five years we have tried a variety of different ways to store eggs.  We wanted to make sure that we eat the oldest eggs first.  In our first year we wrote the date which we collected the eggs in pencil.  It only worked for a short period of time.  Pretty soon we realized that we had to sort through all the eggs in a basket to make sure we used the older ones.  Not very effective.  

 For the last few years we have been using egg cartons with the tops removed.  This worked out pretty well.  We used them from the front and put new ones in the back.  As you can see in this picture I ran out of egg cartons and had to use an egg carrier that we used for our camping trips.  One problem I had with this method is that they are not very stable.  I knocked over the eggs twice and made a big mess on my kitchen floor.   

There are all kinds of things you can buy online to display fresh eggs.  Some of them are really cute and I would love to have them, but some are very pricey.  We decided to make our own (which means that I decide I want one and Mike has to do all the work).  We decided to use this old board we already had and use the circle saw to cut holes to hold the eggs in place.  

We set the eggs on the top of different sizes of the circle saw to figure out which size to use.  The green egg is a normal size egg and we used that one for the board.  The other two I set them out for fun.  The white egg is smaller than normal and the brown egg is way bigger than normal.  It probably has two egg yolks in it. 

Here Mike is giving the drill time to cool off.  It is half way done.

The finished product! In this picture you can see the different size of eggs.  Some of them are so small they went right through the hole, but that will change as time goes on.  Also notice that some eggs have dirty spots on them.  I do not clean them until they are ready to be used.  When chickens lay their eggs they are covered with a protective layer that prevents them from going bad.  This is the reason I can keep my fresh eggs on my kitchen counter.