I've been accused of fowl play!

This blog post is way overdue!  We've had chickens for 7 months now but I just haven't had the time to be on the computer writing about it yet.  Keeping chickens has been quite an adventure!  Not exactly as I had imagined it to be, but then again, nothing ever really ends up being like we imagine it will be.  We've made mistakes and done things the hard way, but here we are finally caring for our own flock of chickens!



  We tried hatching our own clutch of chicks from Emily's 4 hens and some eggs from a neighbor lady last spring.  Only one chick survived.  This is Pip.

We tested our thermometer and found it to be inaccurate and we actually cooked the poor chicks at a much higher temp than they were supposed to be kept warm at.

So we tried another clutch, but only one chick survived that hatching as well.  We aren't sure what we did wrong that time.  Finally, Steve took Emily to the farm supply store on "Chick Day" to pick out a few more chicks to keep our lonely ones company and ended up getting talked into a bargain and came home with 53 chicks!!  So many tiny little fuzzy, warm bodies peeping and pecking and scrambling about over one another's bodies.  It was delightful!

However, we were not prepared to be raising that many and it was a bit whirlwind for awhile trying to throw together a brooder with things we happened to have on hand.

Do you see my little Polish chick?  Isn't he cute?!

We lost a couple chicks right off that didn't seem quite healthy from the get-go.  Then we lost another couple to pasty butt (terrible name!) before we learned what that was and took better care of the other ones.  We did have them all in one large cardboard box...

...but learned they were far too crowded and most likely the reason they got pasty butt, so we built them a make-shift (or slapstick, according to some!) brooder

 out of a couple of tables and using a big box of shoes to hold the lamps.

  After all was said and done, we had 47 chicks feathered out fairly quickly and needing a coop outdoors and we hadn't yet had any time to put one together!

We had so much fun getting to know them and playing with them and caring for them.  We would stand around and just laugh at how silly and cute they were.  My favorite thing about chicks was to watch them fall asleep while standing up and startle awake at a movement or sound and just drop off asleep again like mariannets dropping limply and coming to life.  It never got old!

What did grow old, however, was the smell of chickens.

Here they are a couple of weeks later...growing quickly.  And there's my little Polish pair again, growing sillier looking by the day!  I loved listening to them "talk" to each other.  Emily listened to them carefully and can now speak chicken. :)

We try not to run our a/c unless we are suffering with the heat and humidity and can't be outdoors for the breeze so we were all growing tired of the "chicken odor" coming in through the windows of the screened-in porch just off the living room before we finally got a coop set up for them.

Some of the chicks ended up being roosters.  We bought all pullets, but, well, somebody guessed wrong, I suppose.

We raised them up until they got too ornery and were stressing the hens out and fighting all the time and then we decided it was time we learned to butcher.  They went the way of the freezer.  You can read about our adventures butchering for the very first time in an upcoming post.

My handsome Polish.  You can see how fast they were growing...

and how quickly they were running out of room!  They would jump up on top of the water and the food and up onto the top of the table edge and then on out of the brooder.  The porch is screened in so they couldn't get out, but Lucy, our beautiful black lab, had a litter of puppies and was also shut into the porch.  It made a funny sight seeing her lying on the floor nursing her pups with all the pullets seeming to tip-toe around the new, exhausted mother.

Almost all of the chickens have names and they all have their own personalities, that's for sure.  We all have our favorites, of course.  Among my personal favorites are the two I chose on purpose for the entertainment factor.  The pair of Polish chickens, a rooster and a hen, that I named Mr. and Mrs. Peabody.  They are ridiculous and I never tire of laughing at them.  They are unbelievably comical!  If only you could see silly Mrs. Peabody running about bumping into things because she can't see properly through her ridiculous pompadour and just bouncing back and going about on her cluckety way again as if it was just a matter of course, which, in fact, it is!

We decided to use a loafing shed that was already here on the farm as our henhouse.  Here is Emily digging a hole for a post.  We removed the cattle chute.

Well done, Emily!

Steve added some boards to have something to nail the new wall into.  He used scrap lumber from the work-site where he was driving the Amish men up to work building Derksen barns last winter.

The door was slightly warped and thrown out as scrap as well but does the job nicely for us!

When we had the coop completed enough to put the chickens into we went ahead and did so even though it wasn't completely finished.  We just couldn't wait any longer to get them out of the porch!

 It was an exciting day for all of us!  Kelwynne helped by holding the wicket-gate.

Kezzy led the way for the chicken parade...

The children all grabbed a chicken and made a grand procession...

carrying them one by one to their new home.

Here's Kelwynne getting the door to the coop opened.  You can see how the henhouse is going to be a work-in-progress.  I can't wait to get some barn red paint on it with white trim and all.

The hens seem to be happy!

Ethan seems surprised at that, lol!

 (Or maybe he will be surprised that I posted his goofing off for the camera on the blog!  Ha ha!)

Here is sweet little Fanny in her stroller watching all of the excitement with Kelwynne standing watch over her.

This is Naomi holding silly Mrs. Peabody.

Emily holding one of our absolutely beautiful roosters.  This is Cheerio.  He is an Americana.

This is Molly holding one of the most lovely of all of our hens, Dove.  She is just as gentle as she is soft and beautiful.  She lays pale blue eggs.

The roosters were doing a lot of fighting.  We ended up with 12 Road Island Red roosters.

We can only guess on the breeds our flock is comprised of.  We think we have Road Island Reds, the 2 Polish, a few Cinnamon Queens/Golden Comets, some Black Sexlink, and two that we think might be Black Laced Silver Wyandottes.

Just about the time our chickens started laying their first eggs our new neighbors generously gave us 20 more chickens right about the same age as ours.  We began carrying them from their truck to our coop the same way we always hold ours, cradled in our arms like a pet, and got a few chuckles out of them.  I gather we carry chickens like newbies.  They carried them by twos, one in each hand, hung upside down by the legs.  They said it kept the chickens quiet.  So we learned something new. The chickens didn't seem to mind at all.  We also showed them how Ethan can hypnotize a chicken.  I'll have to post a video some day of Emily hypnotizing Mrs. Peabody.  It is hilarious!

This is Mr. Peabody strutting around like he's one of the big boys. (He is, in fact, less than half their size!)

This is High King Peter.  He is gloriously regal!  You can see the frostbite he has gotten from the cold temperatures lately.

Here is a picture I took out of the living room window one day...  

We hope to get some chicken wire up to fence in the chickens to keep them from eating all of our blackberries, flowers and to keep them out of our garden but until then they have the run of the place and it creates comical situations.  It just tickled me to see the chickens tip-toeing around big ol' Charlie (Ethan's "puppy") taking a nap while they were grazing around in the yard.

  Now our coop is full of happy pullets laying beautiful eggs of all sizes and colors!

We have dark brown, light brown, rose, blue, olive green, speckled and all shades of brown!

We save all of our eggshells and wash them and dry them and crack them into little pieces and feed them back to the hens for a calcium supplement.  They love them!

Fresh eggs make for happy breakfasts...

and are so delicious it's almost frightening!

Here is Noah holding one of our "windfall eggs" (one of the many terms for the first eggs a hen lays) next to an older hen's egg.

Little Kelwynne holding Mrs. Peabody's first 2 eggs.  They are so tiny!

Mrs. Peabody's first egg next to a store bought egg for perspective.

Beautiful eggs!