Do chickens still lay eggs in the winter? That’s a common question many curious poultry lovers ask me.

The answer? It depends.

Egg laying chickens will naturally taper off and cease egg production in winter months, assuming you live somewhere that gets darker in winter months than summer.

In Alaska, where our winter months might only have a handful of daylight hours, many chickens stop laying eggs altogether – unless you supplement their light. 

If you want to continue collecting eggs all winter long, you’ll need to add some sort of lighting in your bird’s coop to keep them awake. It doesn’t need to be any special sort of light, like a plant light spectrum. Something as simple as string lights will do, as long as they’re bright enough.

I chose to let the feathered ladies have a break from laying this winter – and I wanted a break from collecting several times a day! (When the winter days are freezing here, you need to collect eggs before the freeze and crack open.)

We did have to buy a few dozen eggs this winter to get us through, but now the chickens are back to laying a few eggs a day. And that number will only increase as Alaska’s midnight sun begins to make a return.