Teenagers......they're nothing but trouble!

Tonight we've decided that the kids are big enough now to let them have free range to the larger coop so we removed the cage portion of their little home and have let them roam free for the evening.......This will be their first night in the big open coop and in typical teenage fashion, they're staying up late! The older ladies have already settled into their comfy roosting spots but the kids are still pecking around at the ants and other creepy crawlers that were hiding under a layer of straw (which got removed from the pen tonight after the small rainfall this afternoon made it smell damp and gross)......Never mind that I'll be up all night worrying like true mother Hen how my babies are doing and if they're safe. More than likely I'll be hunting amongst the sunflowers for baby chicks that stayed up way too late and couldn't find their way back to their little hutch.


The ladies are watching from the roost and I can imagine "rolling their eyes" at the sight of these 4 little crazy birds with a new sense of freedom and curiosity of their newer surroundings.

At least now that the hutch is free maybe it will encourage the older gals to start laying eggs again!?! One can hope. 

For being in the "ugly" teenage stage of their lives, I think our birds are especially cute. It's funny watching them fly about the coop or even run through the sunflowers (which probably feel like a forrest to a little bird) Goldie was getting a little more curious about the open door to the backyard. I kept trying to catch her but they're so fast now! I love these little sweeties and it's so fun that they each have their own little character! Even our big girls are showing more of their personalities now. 

It makes my heart so glad to see my little brood growing up healthy and happy! It was so heartbreaking losing our first 3 but time is healing that wound. I sat out in the backyard this evening and watched all of them enjoying their time out, watching them interact with each other and even seeing a few late evening worker bees buzz busily amongst my sunflowers while my two kids played together in the yard.....my backyard is starting to feel peaceful again. I can't wait to start getting my winter garden put in and enjoy more evenings on my back porch. For the first time in awhile I had to make my kids come in and take their baths! LOL I love when my kids want to be outside and are truly enjoying barefoot adventures in the grass, pretending to be pirates or playing in their playhouse. 

Now if I could get my teenagers to go inside their hutch and go to sleep! 

You are what you eat....

A few weeks ago I ordered a fabulous book from amazon called "Made from scratch, Discovering the pleasures of a handmade life" by Jenna Woginrich and wouldn't you know her first chapter is on raising Chickens! This is a gal after my own heart and even as someone who grew up raising farmyard animals, I still learn so much as my experience with them goes on. I don't know why it never occurred to me that even if you are raising your own backyard flock, if they don't eat an organic diet, it doesn't mean they're giving you organic eggs just because they're in your backyard and dining off the grasses of the lawn or the greens in your garden (like mine)....It's worth the little extra money to buy organic feed for the animals you're raising, I'll leave it up to you to extend that to family pets, I'm not about to go out and change the food of my dog and cats but then again I'm not consuming anything from those animals either.... Eggs are something that should be organic and free range and fresh and healthy from a healthy hen who has access to greens and grass and dirt and all the other benefitting factors of a natural environment including organic grains to help fill in the gaps from which she might be missing from a free range diet. For those of you who know me personally know how I am about Organic, I'm a big advocate for Locavore and Organic (Locavore is a person who consumes foods that are grown/raised locally and seasonally)

Over the weekend my cat got a wrapper from some sort of organic fruit snack that one my children had unwrapped and dropped on the ground. After finally discovering he did in fact have something stuck in his throat and that I wasn't going to be able to just dig my fingers in and fish it out, I took him to the ER vet and the poor baby had to be sedated to get it removed. The vet came out and showed me the piece of wrapper he had found and asked if it looked familiar....yep right across this corner piece of wrapper were big green letters reading "ORGANIC"....at least he was trying to eat healthy :-) A friend of mine said "Kara's cat for sure" after finding out about the organic wrapper and we can all laugh about it now that my cat is feeling better and organic wrapper free. Organic is a word that is being really overly used right now but "Natural" has become a some what negative word, Organic is the only word that we have for how things should be raised/grown and when I read this morning from my book about how normal "natural" chicken feed is processed and treated with chemicals and pesticides, it clicked that the diet I feed my chickens matters if I want to have organic fresh healthy eggs coming from my hens. It makes sense to raise babies on Organic feed so that those babies grow into healthy hens. Right now we used a purina brand laying feed and chick starter which is treated with antibiotics.....

My husband broke my chick water feeder yesterday while refilling the chicks water so first thing I had to do today was go buy a new one. Usually when I go to my feed store and need chicken feed I just holler out that I need some lay pellets and some guy brings it out to my car for me while I pay at the register. It never occurred to me that they might have organic lay feed so I browsed around a little more today and found that they do indeed have organic lay feed so I bought a bag. My girls aren't laying right now but they should start up again pretty soon and when they do, they'll be giving me ORGANIC eggs :-)

The kids are in their "Teenage" stage now, baby fluff is falling out and being replaced by little feathers and they're looking really ratty these days. They've also discovered the hutch and love to sleep in it at night. Sunny of course led the pack, she was the first to climb the ladder and the first to get a cozy spot inside the hutch.

It didn't take the rest long to follow her lead and find that they too like the cozy feel of a hutch at night to sleep in. It's kinda cute how they sit by the door and look out. Inside is a little roosting bar that is raised a few inches off the floor and I'm sure it won't be long before they figure out that they like to roost on the bar. My babies are growing up fast!

Where are my eggs???

Well we've had our chicks and hens for 2 weeks tomorrow and it has been 2 weeks since our Easter egg hen gave us a single egg, it's the only one we've gotten from both of our hens. I've tried everything I could think of to encourage laying but to no success.....and then it occurred to us that they might be molting. Molting is a thing chickens do typically in the beginning of fall (or in this case, late summer) when they grow new feathers and expel old feathers, sort of similar to a snake shedding it's skin and during this period of molting they don't lay eggs. Well that solves the mystery of why we aren't getting eggs. I'm sitting on my couch tonight and happen to look out at the girls jumping up to their roosting spots and see them pull out some feathers and let them go.....yep molting for sure! I guess I can stop searching for eggs like an obsessed egg crazed lunatic.


Here's our lovely ladies in their cozy roosting spots for the night. This is when it's easier to go out and pet them and talk to them and get them more used to us. They're fairly tame for being grown but still a little stand offish to us during daytime hours. Chickens roost at night as a form of protection from predators on the ground. If you ever want or need to catch a chicken, wait until roosting hours (an hour before sunset our girls are up getting ready for bed) chickens are pretty much blind at night and flightless too which is why they roost as high as they can get. Our chicks don't yet roost because they're still babies but as they get to be older in a few weeks, they'll have that same instinct to seek higher places to sleep.

  So this past week we had some crazy weather for July, rain and thunder and lightening storms for a few days (and then crazy humidity for us) Saturday when the bigger storm rolled in we relocated the chick hutch into the coop so the bigger ladies could take refuge inside from the storm and we brought the babies in for a dry night indoors. Moving the chick hutch is a lot of work plus it's heavy so we decided to acclimate the babes early to the older hens in hopes that they'll all be so used to each other by the time the babies start to outgrow that little pen that we can just transfer them all into the larger coop. At least that's the plan and the hens don't seem to mind the babies at all but they still have the safety of the wire between them.

I have a lot of friends that ask me what our setup looks like so here's some pics. This is the chick  hutch. We bought this setup at our local feed store for our original hens who were also babies when we got them. It has a side door to access the upper level where the hens lay eggs, a back door and a flap that shuts on the top of the wire section, it also pulls apart so you can have a free standing hutch without the wire cage section.

And this is our larger coop that's about 50 feet long and 7 feet tall. My husband (and I) built this last summer to give our hens more running room and free range to my garden. Had I known that chickens will eat a garden down to nothing, I would have made their coop smaller! It's kinda shabby looking but we were building in the dead heat of summer and just trying to get something up that would contain our hens that had outgrown the chick hutch. As you can see I still have some of the less tastey veggies (and plenty of weeds and chocolate mint) growing inside. We will renovate this at some point because I want more of a garden space and we could probably do a better build job in a cooler season. 

Here's my little Goldie posing for the camera. The babies have grown so much in just the 2 weeks that they've lived with us. They're starting to be a lot easier to catch and they respond to my talking to them.

Kaitlyn and her little sunny who is getting more white and brown feathers every day...It will be neat to see what they look like in a few weeks after all their baby fluff falls out. 

Here's Edward and Blackie, he is learning to be really gentle with the babies (although he thinks it's funny to make them fly by chasing them around a little) She's our smallest baby and by far our fastest to catch! You can tell she's the runt of the group, she kinda does what everyone else tells her to do and she's very clingy to the other chicks. 

                                      

Growing chicks

Well it's been a week since we bought our chicks and hens and I am amazed at how much they have grown in one week! We've gotten into this sweet little routine of spending the late afternoon with them, I let the kids get them out of their pen to run around in the backyard and truly feel the benefits of free range. We hold them for a little while and then go back out in the early evening when the hens begin to roost and collect the babies and put them in their little pet carrier for the night.

I'm super paranoid that something will happen to them at night so I like to bring them into the house to be safe. Last night I was a little later getting to them than usual and they were all huddled up toward the front of the cage where the door is, when I came out they almost hopped into my hands trying to get into the carrier for the night, I guess it's good that they like their little routine.

In the last few days they have sprouted more prominent tail feathers and their wing feathers have filled out, they even hop of the ground and flap trying to fly a little. It's funny to watch them try out their wings. This is Goldie, she's mine. You can already tell she's going to be a really pretty light colored hen with some reddish/brown accent. All our babies have their own unique personalities and distinct looks. 

Kaitlyn is crazy about Sunny who appears to be the most dominant chick. She's definitely the leader and the most ambitious and curious of the 4. She's been learning how to climb the ladder up to the upper part of their little hutch and she was the first to try and fly. She also keeps the others in check. lol

Even though they do enjoy their free time outside every day, they love their pen and are always trying to get back in when we have them out. Something about it feels safe to them, it's home....

My sunflowers are starting to open this week too. Sunflowers are my favorite flower and I have about 15 of them in the chicken coop and 6 or 7 out in my front flowerbed. I love watching their little faces move toward the sun and their colors of yellow are so pretty! 

Every year I grow a large garden, this year I focused more on herbs but did plant a few things. Bell peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and jalapeño. I forgot that I had onions in my garden inside the chicken coop and it wasn't until the other day that I discovered that they had actually grown into full sized onions! It has been 2 years since I planted them, I figured once they had bloomed it was pretty much over for them but was too lazy to go out and actually dig them up....good thing I left them! Apparently it takes 2 years before you get a full sized onion. 

Gradening is one of the many ways that helps my life stay quiet and simple...There's this need to be home more to tend to it, to pick weeds often, to go out early in the morning when the sun is rising and check all the plants, pick any veggies that are ready and just enjoy the quiet and peace a garden brings. 

Life can get so noisy, so loud, so busy and chaotic....I was standing behind a man today at costco and he struck up a conversation with me, asking me what kind of summer I have had and if I have done anything fun?...I named off the zoo and aquarium, swimming, lots of family get togethers,  dinners with friends, a little vacation at Paso and a few other trips out of town to which he replied "Wow that is a lot of busy!"....it's starting to feel that way.....I'm a little worn out LOL 

I like a simpler life, I like quiet in my life, calmness... time to smell the flowers, not a lot of plans going on at once, that's just how I am. Don't get me wrong, I have had an amazing summer with my family, my kids and I have made a lot of special memories and it has been so much fun...I'm just at the point where I'm ready to get back to a quieter routine, less busy, more at home, more time with my garden and my chicks. What do you like to do to bring calmness and quiet into your life? 

New Chicks

I decided to start a blog featuring our home grown life. We are a family of four plus 2 cats, a dog and as of today 2 chickens and 4 chicks. I grow a garden, love to cook from scratch, and try to be as self sufficient as possible. If I could have things my way, we would live way out in the country somewhere, live off our land and I would raise a bunch of animals and a massive garden which would supply the goods for the little farm stand I've always wanted but for right now we live in a small suburb in Bakersfield, CA called Oildale or as it's locally know and referred to as "The Dale". 

These last few days have brought a lot of change to our normally quiet little life, we had a very upsetting evening the other night when we came home and discovered our neighbor's husky puppies broke into our yard and then into our chicken coop and killed our 3 laying hens :-( needless to say there were a lot of tears from me, I grow very attached to my little pets. My girls were very sweet and would come up to us when called. They each laid me a delicious egg every single day.

I've raised animals since I was young! The first non-dog/cat pet I had was a rabbit that I showed at various rabbit shows and fairs. My Grandpa built me a gorgeous two room rabbit hutch that stood off the ground about 5 feet tall, it was beautiful and sturdily built. I belonged to a rabbit club. I don't really remember much about the club itself but I remember the first time I laid eyes on my sweet little Kizzy, she was a chinchilla colored lop bunny. I LOVED her so much! We added to our bunny brood with Thumper, a very sweet tan colored lop bunny and during a raffle at one of the shows we won an angora bunny named coconut. Our bunny adventures soon grew into other interests in farm type animals and before we knew it, we were joining a 4-H club and my parents were buying a house with some property so we could set ourselves up to raise larger animals (apparently farm animals are frowned upon within city limits). We had an assortment of chickens, goats, lambs, pigs, dogs, and of course rabbits. I would've liked to get into even larger animals like cows and horses but we had quite the stock of sheep and even began breeding our ewes and raising our own lambs for the local fair. It was a lot of work, a lot of responsibility, and a lot of fun! Now that I've grown up and have kids of my own, it's my dream to someday own enough land to have all the animals and the garden of my dreams while my kids are still young enough to grow up with it and appreciate a simpler life! Someday it will happen but for now I am pretty satisfied with my little backyard farm. 

I've wanted backyard chickens for a long time and when we finally were able to get it started, we went out and bought ourselves two chicks. They weren't baby babies but they were still very young. We started them out in a small coop and hutch that we bought at our local feed store and then upgraded them to a larger 50 ft run that my husband built special just for them on our raised flower bed. Just 7 weeks ago we decided to add another hen to our brood and bought our sweet little Lana, a tame brown hen that was about 6 months old, she had just started laying me little brown eggs. My heart felt so broken over what happened to my hens. Yesterday I took the kids over to our local feed store and they had just got a new shipment of chicks in that morning. We picked out 4 babies! They are so incredibly sweet! 

Who can resist 4 sweet little fluffy baby chicks? 

From left to right we have Goldie, Scooter, Blackie and Sunny

Of course my kids decided that since there were 4 babies, we each get one chicken for ourselves. Kaitlyn picked out a bright yellow chick that has little feathers on her feet. She named her Sunny. Sunny is by far the friendliest baby that we have, she comes up when she's called to. 

Edward picked a black chick with brown stripes down her back and a leopard print pattern of brown on the top of her head. He named her Blackie (but he pronounces it Bwackie) He is crazy about the chicks and wants to hold them non-stop during the day! 

Even our Dog Layla likes the chicks

She very gently smelled them and nuzzled them with her nose

and then she spent the rest of the afternoon guarding them! She wags her tail at them when they come over to the fence by her. LOL

We all love our new babies but my husband wanted fresh eggs right away and these little ones won't start giving out eggs until later this next Spring (even then it will take awhile before they are bigger eggs, it's a maturity thing)....that's quite a few months without fresh eggs so since our chicken run is so huge, we technically could have more chickens then what we had before so today I added 2 full grown young laying hens. I don't know how old they are but old enough to lay and young enough to not be old chickens. They're very friendly and like to be held and talked to according to the gal at the feed store. 

I couldn't resist this sweet girl, she has the neatest pattern to her feathers, normally they're a light to medium solid brown with brownish eyes but she has some red and white feathers and bright orange eyes. She will lay nice big brown eggs. We haven't found her a name yet but that will be coming soon....

This one is an Americauna or better now as an Easter egg hen. She lays greenish eggs! They're nice and large and the most beautiful color! We have two Americauna chicks also. I love colored eggs! She doesn't have a name yet either but she soon will!

And so a new adventure with new chickens begins. I'll miss my sweet girls from before, they really did bring me a lot of joy and laughter, they had so much personality. My husband and I loved watching them find their own special roosting spots each night, we could see them fly up to the roosting poles from our couch in the family room and I loved how excited they would get when we would walk outside to visit with them, they'd run over to the fence and look at us. Hopefully these new hens will come to love us also.