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  Yeah, I bet you thought I was talking about something else, huh? They say third time's the charm. Hopefully "they" are correct. You see, this is our third attempt at backyard farming raising chickens for eggs. The first time (2013) I bought two cute little Buff Orpingtons. Their breed are known as the Gentle Giants in the chicken kingdom. They're also known for their love of hatching out eggs...which means they stop laying when they get broody. Great if you want a living incubator for your fertile eggs but not so great if you're wanting scrambled eggs for breakfast. Eventually the poop to egg ratio got to be too much, so I traded the chickens to a farming friend of mine for some grass-fed beef and raw milk. On our second attempt (Spring 2017) I bought six peepers. It didn't take long to discover that two of the promised pullets were, in fact, roosters. They were handsome fellas and fun to watch...until some mysterious creature killed them. The girls grew and we had just gotten our first few eggs when life threw us for a loop: my husband had to get a new job and we were moving. The chickens had to go. We found a buyer and spent the afternoon rounding up chickens. Boy, those ladies were fast! This weekend I bought ten chicks. (You may have noticed that the amount of chickens we purchase goes up with each attempt at ownership?) I wanted a Buff Orpington, just in case we ever needed a broody hen, but got confused at the feed store and forgot to add one to the mix. At any rate, I got a few Easter Eggers aka Ameraucana, which means we'll have some green eggs. I also got some chicks that are a cross between a Leghorn and a Rhode Island Red. Can't remember the name of'em (1000 GPs Animal Merit Badge will be awarded to the first person who can tell me what this mixed breed is called!! ). And a third kind--I think they're Wyandottes, but I'm not 100% sure I'm remembering right. So we'll have a mixture of brown and green eggses, precious! We were told that 90% of the chicks were female. The other 10% were sneaky males that snuck into the bins. Since we got 10 chicks, we assume one of them is a male. Hopefully that's the one that died last night.  Hey, we're not allowed to have roosters in town so it's either eat him or try to sell him to someone else who'd eat him. Either way, he ends up et. Now all we need to do is build a coop and we're good to go! |
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