Before your baby chicks arrive, you need a brooder for them. The brooder is simply a box or blocked off area that will house the baby chicks for the first several weeks of their life. It can be something more permanent if you think you will reuse it often, but if you don’t plan on getting more baby chicks in the near future, a cardboard box works wonderfully.
Continue reading “Raising Backyard Chickens for Eggs. Part 2 – The Brooder”
Raising backyard chickens to gather your own healthy eggs is rewarding and rather easy. As long as you have a few basics taken care of, the chickens will do the rest. You don’t need to be an expert, and there’s no reason to be afraid. Take care of these basics and you will be gathering healthy, antibiotic and growth hormone free, pastured chicken eggs in no time. Continue reading “Raising Backyard Chickens for Eggs. Part 1 – Getting Baby Chicks”
Our first chicken coop was functional, but left a lot to be desired. We learned a lot from our first little coop, and we put what we learned into our second, bigger pallet chicken coop. Things we learned from the first coop, make a coop big enough to walk in, roosters are big, need a bigger door, and always plan you coop to get even more chickens. Chickens are addictive, and you will always want more. With these things in mind, we worked on designing our next chicken coop.
The first step was to acquire some wooden pallets. Wood is getting more and more expensive. We wanted to do this as inexpensively as possible, as we are cheap. I got a truck load of free wooden pallets for our chicken coop by asking around. Continue reading “Pallet Chicken Coop | DIY Chicken Coop”
I know we have been a little MIA with only the random post lately. We’ve just been so busy trying to get several good size projects done amid all of our normal everyday responsibilities. Neither of us seemed to have enough time, energy, nor inspiration to write much. One of those projects was Jon building a new bigger chicken coop so that we would have enough space for our current flock of 6 as well as 6 more that we got at Tractor Supply almost 7 weeks ago.
Continue reading “Re-homing Our Chickens”
Here it is the first week in March and I am listening to the sleet as it hits the windows…sigh. I refuse to dwell on winter things any longer. So, we will think on happy thoughts….like baby chicks! The chicks are two weeks old now and their feathers are starting to fill in.
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| Flappy – 2 Week Old Production Red Pullet |
Continue reading “Easter Egger and Production Red 2 Weeks Old Chicks”
We have caught chick fever!
Actually, we had planned to get some more chicks this year from Tractor Supply. Our rooster to hen ratio is off and we definitely need about 5 or 6 more hens to correct that. And of course now that we got our first chickens last year we really just wanted more. I’m sure you understand, right? Jon had been wanting to get some Buff Orpington chicks this year because they are supposed go broody easily. I really like Barred Rocks, but we had no plan of getting them. The plan was to check Tractor Supply each week of their Chick Days and hopefully get the Buff Orpinton’s.
Continue reading “Easter Egger and Production Red Day Old Chicks”
Our rooster to hen ratio is really off. The ideal ratio is 1 rooster for 10-12 hens. This advised ratio is to protect your hens from too much “rooster love”. Currently, we have 1 rooster and 5 hens. There is just too much of our roo a.k.a The Hoff to go around and our poor gals are receiving a lot of attention. Roosters dig their nails and spurs into the hen’s back and their beaks hold the hen’s head for stabilization while mating. 3 of the hens have complete bare spots with no feathers on their back. Luckily, none of them show signs of blood, raw, or broken skin.
We ordered hen saddles to cover the bare area for protection to allow the feathers to grow back.
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| Flame Pattern Hen Saddle for Protection |
Continue reading “Proper Rooster to Hen Ratio and Chicken Saddles”
The chickens pretty much just roam wherever they please inside our backyard fence. They do tend to have a couple of favorite spots. Occasionally, we have spotted one random chicken on the steps of the deck. They generally look around and see there is nothing up there for them and leave disinterested.
However, Friday after work I looked out the back door and they were all on the deck. It just cracked us up because we had never seen them do this before. Our guess is there were pools of water standing on the deck where it had rained earlier in the day and it intrigued them. They had plenty of water in their waterer and also the dog’s water bowl. It wasn’t because they did not have any other water. We presume it just peaked their interest this time as usually the deck just has nothing to offer them.
It seems time has just flown by recently. There has been so much to get done. It occurred to me that I haven’t taken any pictures of the chickens in quite a while and my have they grown! We had such a gorgeous day today. We were just enjoying the beautiful day that God had blessed us with (for the little bit we had at home this afternoon) and so were the chickens.
It’s been 14 days since our first egg and in that short time the four oldest hens are now all laying. They are getting the hang of laying in the nesting boxes.
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| In the Nesting Boxes |