I love my hens, and I love getting fresh eggs everyday! I also love the look on people’s faces when I casually mention that I have chickens in my backyard 
As much as I love the fresh eggs, I’m amazed how I can be overrun with eggs with only three hens! If a couple days go by when I don’t bake or fix eggs for breakfast, they really start to add up. It doesn’t help that neither of my boys are real fond of eating eggs. I know the days will be getting shorter, and in a few months I’ll not be getting as many eggs while the girls take a natural break. So, I’ve decided to preserve eggs so I’ll have them during the winter for my baking projects. Pickled eggs don’t appeal to me, so I’ve decided to freeze them instead.
To begin, I pulled my favorite reference off the shelf, “The Encyclopedia of Country Living” by Carla Emery.
I’m freezing whole eggs, so I break a few eggs into a bowl and stir them a bit to break the yokes being careful not to whip in air. For each cup of eggs, you can add either 1 T. sugar or 1/2 t. salt. I elected for salt – but if you’re using the eggs for baking sweets, you might want to use sugar instead. Then pour the eggs into ice cube trays. When they freeze, just pop them out and store them in a freezer bag or container. Each cube is equivalent to about 1/2 an egg. To use, thaw the cubes and incorporate into your dish. I haven’t used frozen eggs yet, but I’ll post my results when I use them this winter.
There are instructions online and in Carla Emery’s book for separating the eggs and freezing the yokes and whites, as well as, dried, pickled, and “larded, salted”.
Other options for using extra eggs include blessing others — my friends love this idea! I can also bless the chickens — believe it or not, hens LOVE to eat scrambled eggs and the eggs are a great source of protein for the girls. The key to feeding eggs to your chickens is to make sure they are well scrambled so they don’t look like eggs. I don’t want to get my girls in the habit of eating their eggs before I can gather them.
Letting nothing go to waste, the egg shells are usually put in the compost, or crushed and added directly to the garden. Of course, my “composting” isn’t at all the way it needs to be. I’m simply putting things in a bucket outside. Building or buying a proper container is on my list of things to do this winter!
This is a good idea! My sister in law has about 5 hens and is currently overrun with excess eggs as she has been unwell and unable to do any baking lately!
I thought I might share another thing you can do with the egg shells. Apparently crushing the shells and putting it in with their normal feed is great for their health. If they start laying soft shelled eggs you just give them some of their old crushed shells and it solves the problem. Its kind of like recycling the nutrients!