What are you doing this weekend?
We are volunteering to clean our church building, then filling our van with our daughters friends before driving back to our home for afternoon play dates, chores and projects.
We're butchering more poultry in the afternoon (do you think little kids will ever want to come back after watching Mr. Kingsley and I end the lives of several roosters?) and improving our fruit orchard. I'm working on building a chick brooder out of an old metal filing cabinet.
Did I tell you we have 100 chicks arriving this month by mail order from Amish farms? I'm super excited. I can hardly wait to go pick up several chirping boxes from our post office! (Luckily our post office is used to getting boxes of birds or bees!) We're reselling half of the chicks. So, if you are a local reader and are dying to start your own family flock, we'll have purebred Silver-Laced Cochins, Australorps, Ameracaunas, and Barred Rocks looking for new homes. 'Cause I know you stay awake at night asking yourself if you can resist the pull of fluffy newborn chicks.
After we finish butchering and gardening, we're washing up to head back into town for birthday parties.
Then I'm trekking into downtown Austin in the evening to body paint a group of people who are heading out for one of the craziest all-night parties of the year. It should be a busy day.
I'll be looking forward to a quiet Sunday with just my family.
I hope your weekend is wonderful!
2 comments:
I'd love to know where you buy your chicks! And any other good resoures for someone just starting out with chickens.
Heidi-
After lots of research into hatchery genetic purity issues, we decided to try out Hoover's Hatchery. You can see their website here: http://www.hoovershatchery.com/
I would recommend staying away from Ideal Poultry or McMurray Hatchery, even though they offer a wider selection of breeds. We have found from past experience that both of those companies are severely lacking in customer service, filling orders dishonestly or carelessly (like a %90 fail rate on our pullet orders!) or a lack of genetic purity. It looked like many of our birds were cross-bred carelessly with other breeds. The ideal situation is to buy locally from chicken breeders you can visit, but we were ordering too many for a local breeder to accommodate our request.
Also, good places to begin your research about chickens would be this website: http://www.backyardchickens.com/
We also own the book, "Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens" and find it to be better written than a lot of other chicken books we found.
Urban homesteading and backyard chicken flocks are raising in popularity, so most large cities have networks or online groups for poultry owners. It's a valuable resource for addressing the needs of your flock according to your local conditions.
We loved keeping chickens in the city before we relocated to the country. We selected breeds that were very docile and quiet so they never attacked our children and made very good pets. My daughter would dress up her Silkie hen and pretend she was a baby!
Best of luck!
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