Egg Storage Ideas? (Before distributing)

I hope that I'm not the only one with this problem.

I have some productive hens now who are providing eggs on a regular basis. I collect the eggs every day and collect them with these two small trays and a big circular holder my brother gifted us for Christmas.

We will give eggs to our family and friends, but we end up washing them before distribution because that is the folk's preference. (We will convert them to the wonders of bloom one day). We usually do that at the end of the week but we are quickly realizing that we don't have the storage capacity for all these eggs before we wash and put them in cartons.

Any ideas on some kind of egg organizer to hold a bunch?

I'm thinking of getting whole dozen wooden holders like the small half dozen ones that I have but I'm not convinced that is the best way.

Thank you for any thoughts and ideas.

I just put them into egg cartons, and stack those cartons. One stays out front, that I pull from when I’m using eggs. The others are oldest at bottom of stack, new ones placed on top, and carton currently being filled at very top and open for filling convenience.

Juniper Zen wrote:I just put them into egg cartons, and stack those cartons. One stays out front, that I pull from when I’m using eggs. The others are oldest at bottom of stack, new ones placed on top, and carton currently being filled at very top and open for filling convenience.

I agree, that's a great idea... ask nearby if they have those paper trays..

I got a lifetime's supply of cardboard egg cartons at a food pantry.  They get hundreds of them with a few broken eggs to pick out.  They consolidate into good dozens and accumulate extra cartons.

For your situation, I'd clean them and put them in cartons in the fridge.  Keep them in order so you can always give away the oldest ones.  Or put them (dirty) in cartons and keep them in order, then clean and give away the oldest ones

I have a new technique that works for me at the moment. I like to call it...

Big Stock Pot



I just carefully place them in the pot and fill it until I process batches. So far, no broken eggs!

Sometimes simple solutions are the best.

When you start getting quite a few and you have more eggs than takers?... Been there.
First, on the label, I printed:
"A hen lays an egg with a fine bloom pellicle on it. I helps preserve the egg for the 21 days it stays under mom".
also:
" Harvested on: "and I fill the date with a sharpie there"
Finally, I printed
"Refrigerate but do not wash until ready to consume".
I find that stating the date they are harvested is more precise, more honest, plus,  I can guide them towards the best eggs I have for their purpose:
Eggs harvested more than a week ago will peel more easily: Make hard boiled eggs with those.
Fresher: They should get  fried or poached.
My customers really enjoy knowing a little more about keeping eggs fresh, why an egg with a deep yolk is better, that breeds with large red "ear lobes" are the ones that lay brown eggs. etc.
Since they come to my house to buy them, it is easy to engage them in conversation. I can also tell them when they can expect another dozen. I'm no "commercial" with 33 birds, so they will often give me their phone number so I can call them when I have 2-3 dozens.
I found that they really enjoy learning more about my birds.
All visits to "see the birds" are "from afar". We look at them when they are foraging outside, and we even peek shortly in the hen house, but no touching, no walking in. I clean the "poop shelves" regularly and sprinkle them with D.E. If they peck at it, it will only keep them mite-free on the inside! Last year, I was sprinkling some of the stuff they put in horse stalls and they quit laying. Maybe that was not the cause, but DE seems to work quite well.
I inspect the eggs that evening and wipe them if they have a little soil, but if they really soiled their egg, I wash it and put it in my house fridge, for home consumption..
I try to establish a rotation so I always know which dozen is the oldest. When I have more than 15 dozens "unsold" which is about 2 weeks of "no customers", they go to a food pantry, still with the date label.
For the egg cartons, I use the 4X3 pack as they seem to stack better than the 6X2. My customers [and I] like the carboard ones with no extras to the plastic foam ones that have to go to a landfill.
When they come back for more, they often bring back the "empties", and my Avery labels that I print will pull off easily, so I can reuse the cartons. I thank them, and if upon inspections, the cartons are not pristine, I keep them to start seeds, like beets, mangels, carrots that normally take so long to germinate.
[Soak the seeds in warmish water, poke a hole in the bottom of the trays, fill with a seed starter make an indentation with a pencil and drop a seed in each hole: they germinate in 3 days! Keep the carton pretty wet inside of a plastic starter tray and plant the whole carton when you are ready, or break them to space them better.]

HA! I like your "Big Stock Pot" method there, Tim! I had something similar going with my last batch of chickens. Mine was called "The Basket"


This though, was actually an overflow location for me. I found a post on Craigslist Free for a ton of egg cartons from a retirement village which provided meals for its members. When I arrived, the gal offered me not only cartons, but also a box of "egg flats" which hold 2.5 dozen:


The flats were a great option for me as they did a great job of protecting and organizing the harvest, and eventually I had friends who would buy in bulk, coming by and swapping out a few flats at a time and I'd send them home with everything packaged in a nice box - how the eggs were delivered to the retirement village originally.

I wash them every day, seems like they get lots of poop on them and my buyers aren’t “trained”.

When they’re dry they go in the carton.  The cartons are stacked in the frige:  in on the right, out from the left.

I don't have chickens; maybe some day, but I'm kind of stumped about providing living quarters and hauling water in the winter...so, alas, no chickens, but in preparation of some day, I went to a local farm that sells eggs cheaply, and I bought six dozen eggs for $9.00 (making me question whether it would be worth raising my own...) I did this with the sole purpose of trying to freeze-dry the eggs.  I scrambled them up and poured the six dozen among the four trays and walked away.  It did a beautiful job.  I was able to then pack them all into a few mason jars.  Sealed well, freeze-drying will keep food for supposedly 25 years!  I'm thinking that this might be a good solution for the winter months...depending on where you're located and if your hens slow down then.  
Right after doing this experiment, I was making a recipe that I wanted to cut in half, but it called for one egg before being divided.  Easy peasy...one tablespoon of egg flakes was perfect!  There are electric mason jar sealers that you can buy quite inexpensively, and this is what I use if I need to open a jar and not use its full contents.  It sucks out extra air and seals it up again.  This does mean that all the eggs prepared this way would be scrambled, but that is not such a bad thing, especially if it was augmenting some fresh eggs.

I have a few egg holders that I made with wire scraps. I used J-clips like you would make a rabbit cage. This wire is 1/2"x1" but you could go up to 1"x2" I would think.

The handle is attached with 14ga scrap electric fence wire and J-clips. The handle itself is a cut piece of branch off of a cedar tree. I made them 10" long, 6" wide and 7" tall. My scrap pieces allowed 3 of those sizes.

The picture below has 26 eggs in it. I can get 4 dozen in there before I go over the top. You probably do not need the hay in the bottom like I have.

I use them to collect the eggs as well until full so I only handle the eggs one time until we use them or transfer to give away or barter. Cage wire is a very versatile thing to have on hand.

Josh, your basket is beautiful; have you thought about selling them?  The size would be handy for all sorts of things.  You could make them in different sizes and sell them as sets.  I know that there would be a market for them.  Price baskets online...I think you'd be pleasantly surprised!

I store eggs in the fridge, and only wash dirty ones, The people I give eggs to don't complain, and bring back empty cartons. In order to have eggs in the low period in late fall/early winter, I freeze some. Here's the way I found that works (ice cube trays didn't, the egg sticks to them till they're half thawed, whether metal or plastic, even when I tried greasing them): I have two plastic eight ounce dip containers. I crack two eggs into each one, beat them lightly with a fork, and put in the freezer. A day or more later, I take them out, run water over the bottom, and let them sit a couple of minutes till I can pop the two-egg disk out of the container (our breakfasts typically contain a two-egg omelette). This goes into a plastic sleeve like a bread bag--which will hold about a dozen such disks. Two of these in the freezer in spring means I usually don't have to buy local eggs in the eggless period in December; I haven't had to resort to commercial eggs in a decade.
Incidentally, I can't believe a Vermont farming is giving away six dozen eggs for $9!

Barbara Simoes wrote:Josh, your basket is beautiful; have you thought about selling them?  The size would be handy for all sorts of things.  You could make them in different sizes and sell them as sets.  I know that there would be a market for them.  Price baskets online...I think you'd be pleasantly surprised!

Thank you. I may create a post with instructions if I need to make anymore in the future so others can see more detail. Pretty easy DIY.

I just use egg cartons.  Rotation in the fridge.  My family, (5 kids and their familys) know which ones to take from the garage fridge.
When I have to many I process them for storage.  I freeze dry a lot of them, freeze a few and water bath a bunch of them.

No chickens here anymore, but back in the day we kept enough chickens to keep family and a few friends well supplied. When surplus eggs appeared we simply put them in a cool, dark, dry place in wire baskets. This worked real well, but I must add a caveat: Our eggs always went to use after a several weeks at most.

I can’t say for sure if it’s true, but EVERYONE advised us that untouched, clean eggs store better than either dirty eggs and washed eggs. So… the trick seemed to be to minimize the need for washing. Joel Salatin has some advice about that in this YouTube video:

Where I live, there are a lot of layers of laws around eggs for sale.  Also, the insurance has something to say about it.

But none of them require them being washed right away.  Which is nice, because there was this article on Mother Earth News ages back that showed how unwashed, unrefrigerated eggs tend to last the longest.

So we keep them in buckets until they reach a critical mass that makes it worth washing.  We are required to have a specific farm processing station with sink and separate fridge - different from where we keep everyday food.  We wash the eggs there, being careful to test for any signs of decay (float test and visual inspection), let them dry, put them in egg cartons, then stash them in the fridge until someone gives us money.  As we have a very long waiting list of people who want to be our egg customers, eggs don't stay in the house for more than a few days.  

So long as the eggs are dry and can breath (no plastic cartons), they last about 3-5 months in the fridge from being washed.  We recommend our customer eat them within two weeks.  They never take that long.  

We have a few customers that want unwashed eggs specifically as they go on long term sailing trips and won't have a fridge.  Unwashed they easily last 6 months, so long as they haven't been in the fridge.  It helps to know before hand so we can keep the cleanest and freshest eggs for them and put the required labels on the cartons so they don't get used for clean eggs later.  

Josh Hoffman wrote: This wire is 1/2"x1" but you could go up to 1"x2" I would think.

The handle is attached with 14ga scrap electric fence wire and J-clips. The handle itself is a cut piece of branch off of a cedar tree. I made them 10" long, 6" wide and 7" tall. My scrap pieces allowed 3 of those sizes.

Cage wire *is* a very useful thing to have on hand!

That's a great basket! I'll have to go digging to see if I still have any J-clips - the last rabbit cages I built were about 20 years ago - but I'm pretty sure I have some good fencing around here, something that might work. If not, there are local stores.  Wire anything (cage, fence, strand) is always useful.

Thank you for the lovely idea! I hope you write out that DIY, though I'm playing with ideas in my head now. Great idea and your basket is useful and attractive.

Josh, I would love if you could post directions for the basket.  That would be most generous; thank you.

Mary, the place where i buy the eggs just raised their prices...They now charge $1.75 a dozen!  It had been $1.50 for years....They are a pretty big distributor in the area, and I guess these wouldn't make the cut to be sold at the "regular" price.  They are like "seconds" I guess.

Barbara, do you know what people charge for eggs elsewhere? Years ago I told a kid at a farmers market that anything less than $2 was too low--now with bird flu and general inflation, even the lowest quality commercial eggs are more than that.

Anywhere from 7-15 dollars a dozen, grocery store western colorado.

Here, in Central Missouri, as of this morning, the wimpy, pale-yolked grocery store eggs were $8.49/doz (USD). I was disgusted - but they were (hopefully) the last ones I'll have to buy for a while, because checking to see if my pullets had (finally) become hens, and YES!!! There were 5 eggs! I have a total of 14 that should all be laying reliably, in short order. I haven't sold my eggs, in the past, only given them to family & friends (that may change, soon!), but I've built a stash of baskets, and rotate them. When I run out of baskets, I switch to the rotation of stacked egg cartons, mentioned above. I don't wash them for storage, but if they're really icky, they get washed & put into the kitchen fridge basket. Only washed eggs go in that one. All the rest go in a separate fridge, in the garage.

For long term storage, I put up limed eggs, to (hopefully) get us through, when they're not laying.

Edited to add - I have often bartered them, too!