Our family is a bit obsessed with chickens.
Back when egg prices started to rise, we decided to raise our own chickens again. It’s been a couple of years at least now. We have mature hens that are producing eggs, and we decided to raise some more chicks this year to make sure we keep the population going. We have a pen with a shed we outfitted as a chicken coop, so they’re safe when we put them up at night, but they’re free to roam the very roomy pen area during the day. We feed them chicken food and table scraps. We’re lucky we’ve had few predator intrusions. This past week, we lost Barbara, who was sitting on a nest of eggs, to a predator, our first loss in quite a while—and yes, all the birds have names. We were sad about that because we were really looking forward to the chicks she was going to have. She produced smallish blue eggs.
The new chicks are being cared for in the basement of the house, so yes, I can hear them chirping in the distance. We have a box on stilts we built (er, the SIL built) and a warming lamp suspended over it. They are attended to several times a day.
We have a very diverse population of chickens because we love how they look and love the variety of colored eggs we get. We have Easter eggers, barred rocks, white leghorns crossed with black Sussex, Rhode Island reds, black and blue copper marans, sexlinks (weird name, I know), and red leghorns.
When the chickens are laying steadily, we produce more than we can eat, so we gift them to folks at my SIL’s police department, neighbors, my brother across the street. The eggs themselves are so much more flavorful than what you get in the grocery store, and the yolks are a brilliant yellow-orange. And yes, the outlay to set up a coup, purchase the chickens, and feed them is expensive, but my daughter and SIL, along with help from the children, all pitch in to share the workload. Most of the chickens remain in their enclosure, but we have three chickens, The Sandersons (yes, named for the witches in Hocus Pocus) and Raven (she’s all black), who jump the fence and like to hang with us outside on the patio.
To be clear, I have nothing to do with raising the chickens, but I do enjoy the results!
Anyway, the photo for the puzzle isn’t of our chickens—ours are like I said before, more diverse. However, I was thinking about the chickens as I was trying to come up with a topic for today’s puzzle, and the chicks were chirping loudly, so…
For a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card, solve the puzzle and tell me whether you have ever raised chickens or would if you could. I know some folks in the suburbs are getting those mini-coups for their backyards. Let me know if you like the idea of fresh eggs and critters in the yard!
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My daughter was a little irked I hadn’t included pictures of our friendly trio, The Sandersons and Raven. So, here they are hanging out.
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We don’t have chickens, partly because we don’t have the infrastructure on our homestead and it isn’t something that’s in our priorities for spending in the near future. We’d need to build a coop and safe barn, fencing, and I’d like to have a livestock guardian dog if we did get livestock.
My husband has always said he doesn’t want chickens because of the noise. I would love to have peacocks, and he’s veto’d them for the same reason. But as egg prices rise, we’ve discussed it off and on.
Our solution has been, we purchase from our neighbor homesteaders. It’s so much fun! The lady down the mountain from us sent me pictures of “the girls,” and we chat about them periodically. And man, I had no idea how much better fresh eggs taste! It’s NOTHING like store eggs. I won’t ever go back.
The fascinating thing is, there are eggs even in cities! I find them for friends just by looking at “you pick farms” and “local CSA’s” (Community Supported Agriculture) in whatever town it is. Mind you, this is here in the States, but there are lots of resources for supporting local farming.
Have you ever seen “Chicken Math?” It’s hysterical. My neighbor who raises alpaca follows “alpaca math.” And “sheep math.” It’s a whole thing. ~grins~
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Love fresh eggs, not as excited to raise our own chickens as I would eventually be the one that would eventually be stuck taking care of all of them. Not to mention having to kept the 2 German shepherds away from upsetting them just sounds like another headache. But if I truly wouldn’t have to take the responsibility of caring for them, I wouldn’t be opposed to having some.
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I don’t have the space for it, nor would I be able to deal wth all the work involved. I live on the main street in town and I am 99% sure we are not zoned for it. Now, further up the hill, there are several families who do have chickens and they’ll sell the overflow eggs.
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I would love to have chickens! Once we retire we are going to move somewhere that we can have farm animals.