Chickens! It’s been so long since I’ve written about them here or on Instagram, but we managed to keep our flock even though our crazy move and they are now happily settled into their country estate! When we sold our house last June, in 2021, our wonderful buyers agreed to foster our chickens for a few months as we floated around until we found a house to buy. They were extremely gracious with us as we didn’t end up closing on our house until the end of October! The seller of our new home was also wonderfully gracious and he allowed Dan access to the property before we closed so that he could fix up the old goat barn and turn it into a chicken coop. He and my brother Jake tore off the rotting old roof and replaced it with tin. Then Dan built a coop inside the barn on one side and then the other side will be used as a garden shed and a chick brooder. I love the doors he found at a selvage store in Minneapolis! It’s going to look so fun once we put finishing touches on it this summer. The coop also has an automatic door for the chickens that opens and closes on a timer and lets them out into their fenced yard each day. It is awesome. The barn is quite a ways from the house, so the automatic door frees us up to just check on them once a day, instead of twice a day. It will also make it much easier to leave them for a few days.
We moved our seven hens up from the city about a week after we moved ourselves into the house. They were surprisingly easy to move and settled in really well! My brother Tanner gave us a rooster to add to the flock about a month after that. Since the barn is far from the house, we wanted to get a rooster as soon as possible in order to offer our hens a bit more protection from predators. Our ratio of hens to rooster is still a bit low (roosters do better with a larger harem….), but the protection was worth it until we have more hens to integrate into the flock.
Which brings us to chicks! With so much more space for chickens, we knew we wanted to add quite a few to our flock this year. After doing a bit of research on raising chicks in the winter, we decided to order day-old chicks from a hatchery at the top of February. They came by USPS and arrived at our local post office for pick up early one morning. We ordered from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa and were very pleased with the selection, availability, and health of the chicks. We got 15 female chicks of assorted breeds. Five of which lay colored eggs and the other 10 lay brown eggs. Since we got them in the winter, they should start laying eggs by the end of June, which will be fantastic! We have them in our mudroom right now and will likely move them into the garage in the next week or two and then down to the barn after that. We’ve had colder than usual overnight temps, reaching down into the negatives most nights still, so we are having to keep them in the mudroom a week or two longer than we’d hoped. Once they reach 6 weeks, though, they will be fully feathered and will be able to withstand temps down into the 30’s. We will then move down to the barn, where we’ll keep on the garden shed side so they can get used to the rest of the flock and the flock can get used to them. Integrating chicks to an established flock can be very challenging, but I’m hopeful that having more space for them all will make integrating easier than it’s been for us in the past.
Oak has been taking charge with the chicks’ care and has been doing such a good job! He feeds them once or twice each day and he’s so sweet with them. It’s been fun to watch him grow in responsibility by caring for them.
We are so excited that we will soon have enough chickens to actually provide enough eggs for our family! We’ll likely cull most of our older hens this fall, which will leave us with 15 or so chickens going into the winter. I’m planning to preserve some of the summer bounty in order to extend our eggs more into the winter (more on preservation later!). My hope over the next year or two is to completely supply our eggs needs for the whole year. We are also hoping to raise a batch of meat birds this summer and also add a few geese to the homestead for meat and eggs! After so many years of making the most of our little city lot, it is incredibly fun to now have land on which we can truly homestead!