A week after hatching I still have fourteen healthy chicks in the brooder. You can see in the picture that they are beginning to get their feathers. Now that the drama of hatching and moving from the incubator to the brooder is over, the next big question is: what do I actually have?
When we first started raising chickens I really didn’t know anything about it. Mr. Mims remembers that his grandfather kept chickens, in Greenville. When he was young he once moved a chicken coop for his grandfather and then planted a garden in that spot. We read a few books on the subject, and after Mr. Mims constructed the coop, we took the leap. At the time, when I read about the whole incubator thing, I said to myself, why use an incubator, why not raise chickens the natural, old fashioned way?
Eggs without a broody hen…
We have kept a rooster with our hens for three years now. The idea was that we would raise our own chicks for meat. Now, I can tell you that our rooster has been doing his part of the job, and when I crack an egg, I can see that it is fertilized. But we have had just one broody hen that sat on one egg twice, giving us two chicks in three years. Continue reading
I couldn’t tell you what it all means, but hens are not short on chicken talk. It seems that they have especially a lot to say when they are getting in, in, or getting out of a nesting box.
Our first blue egg means that one of our Ameraucana hens laid her first egg.
It seems to me that the more I learn about chickens, the less I know. We took the leap back in May, and have been living with chickens for six months now. We’re still on our chicken honeymoon.
All of our chickens have survived, and the hens have started laying eggs. We are still excited enough about our eggs for the whole family to keep count of how many we collect each day. Today I collected eight for the first time.
They lay their eggs in the run, and on the floor in the coop, and in the nesting boxes. I come around, rinse them off, and put them in the refrigerator. I really don’t know which hens are laying the eggs. Yesterday we had our first blue egg, so I know that one of our two Ameraucanas laid her first. Continue reading