Chicken Little

Photo: Our chickens. (Canon 50d)

For our second post, I will discuss a little bit about our Chickens.

The next few posts may be a little dry for a few posts. There is a lot of info to add from past experiences. While I catch up to where we are today, I will be posting in past tense, but the info is just as good. And when it came to the chickens, we had a LOT to learn.

The cool thing is that we knew nothing about raising them and still succeeded.

We have 8 chickens. We have 2 buff orpingtons, 2 araucanas, 2 road island reds, and 2 barred rocks. We chose all of these for their egg producing capabilities. The araucanas are sometimes call "easter eggers" because their eggs come out blue or green pastel. Depending on the chicken you choose, you will get white, brown, or even blueish greenish pastel eggs.

Araucana Egg on Left

We ordered our chickens through a local farmers co-op. Typically when they sex these, it is when the bird has just hatched, so sometimes you will get a different sex than what you wanted. This happened to us.

Photo: Chicken Coop (Cell Phone photo)

If you think that you can't do what we are doing... think again. We are in the city, where they frown upon having fowl in your backyard. We asked around all of our neighbors, bribed some with eggs, and chose all females (no roosters!). Roosters are really loud and we didn't want to deal with that mess in town. We have only a half acre lot!!!


In the photo, you can see our basic set-up. In this photo, it wasn't fully finished, but we had converted a dog kennel in the back corner of our yard to a chicken and duck run. It's large, approx. 14x20 feet. If you come into my back yard, you may not even notice it is there because it is in a back corner.

I think this is where I insert my first setback: Our chickens until very recently seemed to be all female. I will keep you up to date, but we have a buff orphington that is growing a larger comb and waddle than all the other chickens. If this is the case I will be making a decision. First we wait until the first crow to truly find out. Once that happens, we are off to get the voice removed OR I will be giving it away to a friend of mine who lives in the country.

Also, I wish I could tell you that our chickens love to spend tons of time with us, but they don't. They aren't too afraid of us by now, but they dont flock to us when we're there. It is kinda difficult to pick them up without scaring them as well. We call them and feed them by hand some as well.

We are not trying to fool people, we read up on stuff first, but some things you just wont know till you get dirty.

This will conclude this post. If there is information that you would like on any post that I make, just message us. That may make for a good topic next time.

Later Urbanites!