Green Eggs and Ham? Yes, please!!

In the beginning there were chickens

   I guess it's only fitting that the first post be about our chickens as they are my favorite thing about our farm. Currently we have 15 hens and no roosters. Of the fifteen we have one Black Sex Link, one Olive Egger, two ISA Browns, three Leghorns, four Golden Comets and four Rhode Island Reds. The idea of having hens for eggs began with a trip to Tractor Supply to find some dog food. It was late March or early April and low and behold when we got to the store they had baby chicks staged in the middle of the store and of course we had to check them out. I don't know too many people that can walk by a bunch of baby chicks and not stop to admire them for a bit. We ended up leaving with six chicks and all the necessary items that go with caring for them initially.

    You will need a self watering bottle, we bought the small one, a small feeder, a heat lamp, preferably with a clamp, a bag of pine shavings and a bag of medicated chick starter/ grower feed. We then went to Walmart and bought a 25 gallon tote to put the chicks in. We lined the bottom with the pine shavings and then placed the self watering bottle and the self feeder in the tote. A word of caution with the heat lamp, it does get very hot so care needs to be taken on how close you put it to the chicks, what you have them in, and all items near by. The chicks need it to help them stay warm as they grow. It is advised to put it to one side of the area where you are keeping the chicks so they have the ability to self regulate the heat they are getting. By putting it to one side, they have the ability to move away to a cooler spot if they are too hot.

    Watering and feeding can be a bit tedious when they are younger, as they eat and eat and keep on eating. The chicks also seem to have a tendency to dirty the water they have with poop, feed, and shavings all the time. Every time we would give them clean water, which would be a couple times a day if not more, a chick would hop in the trough and proceed to yuck it up.  Outside of that little bit of work, it was a joy to check up on them during the day. We had our chicks in our closet and it was almost a peaceful kind of sound to hear the little chirps throughout the day and at night when the lights went out, the chirping would stop and they would go to sleep as well.

So, as you can see this will be a journey of discovery on so many levels. We are learning all of what we do here on our little farm as we do it. There will be plenty of learning experiences and we hope to share lots of laughs as well. As we are new to blogging, we welcome any and all input on the quality and content of our blogs. We hope to post often, hopefully weekly with new content and stories to share. If you have questions we will do our best to respond with any information we can provide from our experiences. Thank you for taking the time to read our post hope you enjoyed it!