Chickens

We’ve been rais­ing chick­ens for a num­ber of years. I often write about them on my house­hold and art blog Ms. Shoes.

Here’s a look at the process of start­ing a batch of chicks from 2008.

April 16, 2008

They rode home from Mon­roe Feed in a card­board box.

They’ll be mak­ing their home in a repur­posed pup­py pen set up in the feed room for about 6 weeks.

It did­n’t take them long to find the food!

I hate to admit it buy I already have a favorite. The lit­tle Egypt­ian Fay­ou­mi. I sus­pect he’s a roost­er but we’ll see.

The oth­ers are:

• 4 — Rhode Island Reds — We’ve had good luck with these before and they can become quite tame. Red Hen used to sit on the sta­ble door and wait for some­one to come by and scratch her back.
• 3 — Ara­canas — For the pret­ty eggs.
• 2 — Gold Lace Wyandottes
• 1 — Sil­ver Lace Wyandotte
• 1 — Buff Orpington
• 1 — Phoenix — A Japan­ese breed best known for the
  extrav­a­gant tails on the roost­ers. The hens are said to be very calm.

May 17, 2008

One month lat­er and the chick­en are ready to move out­side. They actu­al­ly spent most of the last month in the  shop rather than the barn because we had such unrea­son­ably cold weath­er dur­ing the last half of April.

Over the last month we have moved the chick­en coop. And got­ten it  fixed up and paint­ed. Sat­ur­day we fin­ished putting the pop door on the coop and built a lit­tle yard for the chicks to use for the next month or so.  A prop­er­ly large yard is in the works but putting down fence posts  in our rocky soil is not light under­tak­ing. We have to get the back­hoe out and put it on the tractor.

Being chick­ens they do not appre­ci­ate all the time and effort that went into cre­at­ing such an exquis­ite chick­en palace and pre­fer to hang out under the coop.

Jun 25, 2008

The chick­ens have out grown their lit­tle play-pen yard and need a real fenced yard. We built it last week. You can see the gory details on Ms. Shoes blog.

Mean­while here are four por­traits of our birds.

Aracana

Buff Orpington

Phoenix

Banty Frizzle