Last week marked our third official foray into chicken keeping and our house is a-peepin'. I have missed having cluckers around over the last few months. As you may or may not have been aware of from my previous posts on the subject, I had taken our last two hens to be processed in mid-December. Yes, I got a little weepy. But being without that part of the daily routine for a little while really recharged my batteries, and I am raring to go with Flock3.0.
I picked up the 6 chicks on last Wednesday, less than 24 hours after they hatched: two Aracaunas, two Barred Plymouth Rocks and two Black Australorps. Since they will take roughly 6 months to mature, I plan on adopting some mature hens from another poultry enthusiast friend of mine, so that the egg train can be puffing down the track in the meantime. I hope that the integration process will be a little smoother this time around - see my previous post about the disaster from the last cross-generational experiment.
I don’t have much prep left to do, which is good, considering we just got about another eight inches of show. The chicks will live in the brooder (ie, our ingeniously rigged dog kennel) until their adult feathers come in, about a month. I cleaned out the run and the coop a few weeks ago during an unseasonably warm day, and my main garden bed has a two to three inch layer of the most beautiful composted stuff now… the stuff that fabulous vegetables and fruits are made of, literally.
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