Becky's Random Ramblings: April 2013

... and I fear I may be a crazy chicken lady.

You see, in May of last year Dustin and I discussed getting chickens and found the feed store was already sold out of them. So a friend and I ordered 15 birds together via mail- I got 6 and she got 9. Our Buff Orpingtons are wonderful, sweet birds. They are SO easy to care for and Dax is madly in love with them. "The Girls" got names shortly after...although we don't know which is which... originally I believe their names were Rosie, Sunny, Popcorn, Peaches, Dottie, and Penny. I love their names but they have now, all six, become known as "the girls" or Peaches and Popcorn--the two names Dax came up with of course.

Since these girls have always been so easy, I thought this spring, I am SO getting more chickens. Which then began my investigation of different breeds. I decided on dual purpose birds- they'll lay eggs and we can butcher the excess since I really only want to winter 10 birds. My very good friend, Lynnette and I watching Big R like hawks waiting for baby birds to arrive! We had the date down and everything! She made it first and reported back the breeds available. I then set to deciding on numbers from the research I did online. 10 birds in all- 5 Silver Laced Wyandottes, 1 White Leghorn, 2 Rhode Island Reds and 2 Black Polish- just for fun, they're pretty much ornamental. (You should have heard me rattle off those numbers, I had rehearsed!) And... of course... they got names. The RIR are Rhodie and Butterscotch, the Black Polish are Coco and Puddin (Dax named) and the Leghorni s Uncle Bill's honorary chicken because he named it Foghorn. Actually the conversation went like this:

Me: this one is a leghorn
Bill: You CANNOT have a Leghorn and not name it Foghorn, in fact if it dies I will buy you another one.
Me: sounds like this is your chicken- want to take it home??

Not sure what he said next but ended up being a "no go"

JUMP ahead 3 weeks and Dustin and Dax make a trip to Big R and report that there are NEW breeds at Big R. Which I pass on to Lynnette. Of course they can't remember WHAT the breeds ARE but I decided to check it out. Ha! At this point we have 16, yes 16 chickens! SO you'd THINK that I had enough, right? HELL NO! We came home with 4 more. 2 Barred Rocks, 1 Black Sex Link and 1 Gold Sex Link. Sex Link means they can tell gender by the color they are at hatching---guaranteed hens.

Once I got home and got everything set up-- the number of chickens we had began to sink in. 20 chickens... we went from 6 to 20 chickens. That's like...INSANE! We had 6 chickens outside in a coop, 14 in a dog kennel in the laundry room and 4 in a box in the kitchen. Big, Medium and Little Chickens. It's nuts. Dax thinks it's the best thing ever!

We are now another 3 weeks into having 20 chickens and we now have only 4 chickens in the house- they are in a bird cage now and in the laundry room. The medium chickens are in the dog kennel surrounded by the baby fence. It works.

I am also getting a BIG COOP! As a birthday present Dustin got me the plans for a chicken coop-- this also spurred the being "okay" with getting more chicks. :)

I am a little scared this might turn into a chicken blog... and it could because...well... they're cute and I think it's pretty neat we're raising our own food!

Any roosters will probably be butchered and we really, truly only plan to winter 10 chickens-- anything over 12 will not happen-- they will be butchered.

Next year I think we'll do just meat birds.

Here they are....