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Posted By on March 1, 2016
We were so busy last year taking care of our new chicken flock…that we never even put out a blog about them! Well here is our announcement. We’ve had chickens since last spring! By now they are fully grown and doing great. We have 10 hens and 2 roosters and they all get along very well most of the time. Egg production is picking up after the last few dark and cold months. In January we got 70 eggs and in February we got 116 eggs. March will probably bring over 150 eggs! Lots of hard boiled eggs are consumed for lunch these days.
For anyone who is interested we got some uncommon varieties.
5 Blue Andalusians –
These are the black, gray and white chicks.
5 Cuckoo Marans –
These are the black with yellow spot on the head. They lay super dark brown eggs.
5 Easter Egg Chickens –
These are the tan/brown with stripes. They will lay pastel blue and green eggs (hence the name).
1 Dark Brahmas –
Murray McMurray always sends on free exotic chick with each order and this is the one we got!
Here’s a photo from last spring when they arrived.
Baby Chicks!
Cute!
They grew up very quickly.
Stanley – Blue Andalusian
Humphrey & Bee
Gem
Eventually they reached full size!
Blue Andalusian Rooster – Stanley
Bee – Dark Brahmas Rooster
Then we started getting eggs….and eggs….and more eggs…. I think we have collected over 500 eggs now since they started laying back in August.
We also named all of our chickens. The two roosters are named Stanley (Blue Andalusian) and Bee (Dark Brahmas). The hens are named Penelope, Gertrude, Delilah (Cuckoo Marans), Gem, Opal, Lucy (Blue Andalusian), Rosie, Myrtle, Mable and Hazel (Easter Eggers).
Every one of them is great and has their own special personality. Last year I spent a lot of time sitting with them and feeding them all sorts of treats from the garden. Winter time has brought this to a minimal time but I still go out every day to see them and make sure they have food and water. We set up a large heated container for water and a large bin for food so we don’t need to fill either for a long time. We also have the door on a timer. I’ll post about that later on.
Sadly we also learned how to butcher live chickens. We had 4 other roosters that didn’t make list of chickens to keep. 5 roosters is way too many for 10 hens! Even 2 is pushing it but they get along alright. They were named Tweedledee, Tweedledum, Cristo and Humphrey. Of all of them we miss Humphrey the most and will never forget him. He was a gorgeous bird. They just got too aggressive toward our hens so they ended up in the pot. It was an invaluable skill to learn as a homesteader and we have plans to raise meat birds later on so will be putting it to use again someday. We won’t be naming those birds though. It makes it much more difficult.
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