Thursday, February 24, 2011

The chickens are coming! The chickens are coming! The chickens are coming!

I have wanted chickens for AGES.  Several of my neighbors raise them and the eggs are to die for.

Plus, chickens are funny.  Really - just find  yourself a couple of chickens and sit and watch them for a while.

I found a really good and inexpensive coop design on Mother Earth News.  It uses a dog crate, which I have, and welded mesh fencing and hog rings, which I don't have.  I am looking forward to going to Tractor Supply to get them.

This isn't a big "structure" and it will be fairly easy to drag around the yard so the chickens and grass can do that mutually beneficial thang that they do so well.  Plus, it's "critter proof" so that foxes, etc. can't get into it.  No way to keep the snakes out, though.

I have been browsing chicken catalogs and websites for ages, trying to decide what kind of chickens I want.  Top of my list are Ameracaunas, which lay the blue tinted eggs.  They are so pretty!  We barely go through a dozen eggs here at our house, so theoretically, I don't need a whole lot of chickens.  A good layer will give you nearly an egg a day.

But the breeds!  There are SO MANY interesting breeds!  "SO MANY" being the operative words here....  I finally decided to order based on interesting looks, and not on production capacity.  Add in the fact that I am sure to lose some to inexperience and snakes (and maybe the dogs), and some will wind up being roosters, I have hedged my bets and ordered seven chicks.




These are some sketches of some of the breeds I selected.  I tell you, I canNOT WAIT to see these funny guys walking around my yard, and listen to their gentle, inquisitive clucking.

Except for the roosters.  I can wait for those.  Generally, they are aggressive and noisy.  If some of my fluffy little chickies grow up to be roosters, they are destined for the soup pot, so I can look forward to a new skill:  butchering chickens.

So, now I wait.  I wait until March 23rd, when I will get a call from the post office that they have a noisy box full of holes for me to come pick up.

Wish me luck!

1 comment:

Papa said...

I wish you luck! Have you told the dogs about this?