We got our delivery of 9 Baby Chicks on Chris's Birthday! August 25th!
The girls were overnighted and came in a tiny little box with some hay and some food gel to keep them nurished during their cross country trip.
Right after we got the call from the postoffice saying we had a peeping box waiting for us, Chris and I made a b-line to pick up our awaited delivery. We quickly got them home so we could get them fed, watered and tucked into their new nesting box.
We have been planning this for weeks of course and had already visited our local farm supply store to pick up all the necessary items. Baby chicks are pretty easy to please and not very expensive to care for, all they needed was about $20 worth of goodies. A trip to Southern States and we were set with a Water bottle, food trough, baby chick feed, heatlamp to keep them warm, and thermometer to make sure the temp stays at around 95 degrees for the first week. Since chicks get cold quickly and cant have drafts at all, we have the box nice and toasty and lower lower the temperature by 5 degrees every week for the first 4-5 weeks.
Havent named them yet since we cant tell them apart at the moment, but they will be named after different plants. (Yes, We are sticking with the botanical theme!)
(P.S. The names Lilly and Tulip are already taken by the goats!)
But we have thought of a few more for the hens:
Rose
Violet
Fern
Buttercup
Daisy
Holly
Mari (as in marigold)
Camelia
Petunia
Maggy (as in magnolia)
So here are the girls!
Check out the video and you can tell, all they do is eat and sleep! (and poop!)
They are big into napping. They literally will be in the middle of eating and just doze off. It is pretty cute you can see they are having little bird dreams but after a quick cat nap of about 5 minutes or so they are back up and running around.
They seem pretty happy in their 2x2 ft box for now, but they have already starting pecking at the ground, so i am excited for the day when they can start demolishing all the bugs on the property. I can tell they will be the best bug zappers! A fly flew in the box and their heads all turned in sync to watch it and I could tell what they were thinking! Chris even saw them doing the scratching motion at the paper, on day 2 so watch out bugs!!
The hens will make use of any of our table and garden scraps along with the goats of course and both chicken and goat poop will make for great compost in our garden.
We ordered the hens from mypetchicken.com
Basically we chose this website as it was one of the few hatcheries that will sell less than 25 chicks at a time. Also the chicks came already sexed (no roosters!! we only wanted hens!! ) and immunizied so they would have a high survival rate and a healthy chickhood. And just so we can dismiss any questions for you city folk - yes hens can lay eggs without any rooster around. lol. If you dont believe it - google it :)
We picked the "New Hampshire" breed of chickens, which are known to be good layers of brown eggs and are closely related and more commonly known Rhode Island Red.
Here is the designer coop Chris built that is waiting for them once they are big enough to go outside. It was made it a few months ago and it is already situated at the farm.
It will be about 5-6 months before any of the girls will be laying eggs, but we already have a string of customers on the waiting list for Back Bay Botanicals Brown, Free-Range, organic eggs!
We will keep you posted on their progress!!
Chris & Gina
