Chick-A-Doodle-Do

Somewhere in the midst of all of our downsizing and doing more with less, I decided that we needed to have chickens. How in the world having 14 chickens is having less is a question that I can't answer. It is definitely more, but in a good way. Fresh, beautiful eggs and constant two-legged, beady-eyed entertainment are some of the ways that having chickens has added more to our lives.

I knew absolutely nothing about having chickens when I started out. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not a thing. But that didn't stop me from coming home with 10 baby chicks one day. It started out innocently enough. I had been toying with the idea of having chickens and then I had to go by the feed store to pick up some feed for our horses and low and behold it was chick season and the store was full of the sound of one-week-old baby chicks chirping away. I asked a few questions about how to start out baby chicks and learned that they needed a heated spot called a brooder where they could keep warm until their feathers grew in. I figured I could make one of these out of an old 150 gallon water tank that I had found behind one of the old barns on our property. I bought a book on raising chickens, a heat lamp, feed trough, water container, feed, and bedding, and put 10 chicks 'on hold' while I hurried home to prepare the brooder. I then zoomed back and came home with 10 peeping chicks in a tiny box seated in the passengers seat of my car. There is nothing as cute as a newborn chick!

Now that we had these delightful little creatures, I had to figure out what I was going to do with them when they outgrew their brooder. From the books I had purchased, I learned that we had about a month to get something built for them. I had decided that the perfect place for a chicken coop would be in the back corner of an old outbuilding that was on our property. It had been used as a horse barn, sheep barn, cowshed, and for grain storage from what I could tell. We could build a chicken coop in the back corner and a covered run out from that. My dad lives on our property with us and is a retired builder, so I enlisted his help in converting this space into a safe, warm space for our flock.

Here is the chicken run the gives them a completely covered space that protects them from the many hawks and owls that we have here.

Here they are checking out the new nesting boxes that we just installed. They weren't sure what to do with them quite at first, but they have it figured out now. I've since switched to using shavings in the boxes as they are much neater and the hay doesn't clog up the screen on the droppings pit below their perch. Live and learn!

And here they are shortly after they were introduced to their new chicken run. They were very pleased and so was I. Needless to say, there is not longer grass in there. They have eaten every single piece of green, so we let them out in the garden under supervision whenever possible and supplement their diet with fresh green stuff from the kitchen or pasture.

All-in-all they have been very easy to take care of and give back so much more in terms of just the sheer fun of watching them and collecting the beautiful, multi-colored eggs. By Fall, we were collecting many beautiful eggs.