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.
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