The Hunnie Pot: Chickens

The Un Gardeners

There is nothing that puts a smile on my face quicker than beautiful Spring flowers popping their sweet little faces up this time of year. I love them so much that I even crawled around in my yard and snapped some photos of my gorgeous bulbs making their way out. I had this bright, happy post planned out in my head and it was going to express my happiness for my flowers and the following images:

Ok. I love, love, love, love, love ranunculus. I love them so much that they were on the top of my list of wedding flowers, however, we could not get them because their blooming season do not coincide with my wedding date. I was a little bummed, but it was ok. Imagine my glee when I was walking out of Home Depot two weekends ago and they had these beauties for $4.99. I was ecstatic!

After about twenty minutes of deliberation on the which pot was the perfect pot to bring home and to my mother-in-law, I finally loaded them in the car. I could hardly wait to get them home to my mother-in-law because Ben was not feeling my ranunculus excitement.

I have babied these flowers, brought them in when it was cold, loved them, taken pictures of them. Sheer bliss.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. I look outside and my chickens (that I have discovered I don't love so much anymore) were on the porch (that I have just bleached). I go outside to shoo them off and find them in sheer bliss as well.

Here are my beloved ranunculus. Or what is left of them. I may or may not have cried when I saw the devastation. I blame that on the hormones.

This is not the first time something like this has happened.

I had a beautiful pot of succulents. Gone.

Most of my snowflake flowers. Gone.

My pine straw in my flower beds.

Mayhem.

It's a good thing they are giving me fabulous eggs because we almost had chicken and dumplings for supper. No hormones involved with this one. Please pray for the safety of my chickens.

And the rapid recovery of my ranunculus.

Easter Chickens

Instead of the Easter bunny, I have Easter chickens! Just in time for Easter, my Ameraucanas have started laying their beautiful blue-green eggs. Every time I open their laying box, it's just like the Easter bunny, or Easter chicken, came!

They make me so happy! I might have to stockpile them so I can hide them when it comes time for the real Easter Bunny to come!

Big Chicks

I have been a slacker about posting pictures of my now quite large chickens. They have come a long way from the incubator! As of right now, I have 18 chicks in the chicken house. The roosters have found their voices and they like them!

These are my Rooster boys. There are five - which is causing some problems - more on that later!

Here is one of my sweet girls. They are a good bit small than their male counterpart....

Here is a comparison of the two.

Here is my one Welsummer hen. I call her Little Girl. I don't know why - maybe it's because out of the ten Welsummer babies I bought, nine of them were roosters!

And the most exciting news of all is that they are now laying eggs!!!

They are pretty small in comparison to a large store bought egg. They are pretty lost in the carton, but I have high hopes that they will grow with time.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to taste my wonderful eggs. Being the wonderful chicken parents that we are, Ben and I continued to feed our sweet chicks their starter food that, unbeknownst to me, has antibiotics in it. Ben was so thrilled to tell our friend at the feed store that we had our first egg and that we needed more feed for our hungry chickens. When he learned we were still doing starter food I got a frantic phone call from Ben saying "DON'T EAT THE EGG!!!!!" Apparently it is not a good idea for pregnant women to consume the eggs with antibiotics, so I have them as my little trophy's right now. Only my Domineckers are laying right now - my Welsummers will lay a dark brown egg and the Ameraucaunas will lay a blue egg. I can't wait for both of those!

Growing Chicks and Newbies!

Are you there?!? I have been super busy with school and cookie making, so I have not had much time to blog.

The chicks are growing fast and they are almost ready to move out to the chicken coop. I can't wait to show you the pictures of the precious coop! Ben is doing a great job!

Since I am a slacker and have not posted any pictures, here are some pictures of the hens through their three weeks.

Two weeks old

Three weeks old

At four weeks these chickadees move out! They are stinkin' up my garage something fierce!

Unfortunately, I think I only have 7 hens. That means 10 roosters.
Roosters = no eggs = moving off the farm.
The man that we got the eggs from is hopefully going to take the roosters and a couple of hens so I will just have 4 or 5 of these little ladies.

There is starting to be a big difference in the looks department between the boys and girls. Their colors are really starting to change.
Here is a boy and a girl.

The girl is the dark one on the left, and the boy has more defined stripes and is a little lighter.

This is a little rooster. His feathers are beautiful and you can really see his pattern coming through.

You can also see his comb starting to turn red.

Ok. I think I may have a chicken problem.... I got MORE chickens. I have been planning to do this all along. I want to have a variety of chickens so I got a few more and I will have to wait to see how many are hens of those too. They are the cutest chicks in the world. They look like little chipmunks. I took a little day trip to Tennessee and picked them up from a sweet woman who sells over three thousand chickens a year! That's a lot of chicks! She ended up giving me a couple since we couldn't tell if they were girls or boys.

There are two different breeds - Welsummers and Ameraucanas. The Welsummer chicks look like chipmunks and the Ameraucana ones are darker.

There is one chipmunky Ameraucana. However, she is claimed and now named "Chirpie". Lillie came to visit one afternoon and she fell in love with her.

These chicks will lay chocolate brown and blue eggs! I can't wait to eat and cook with eggs from by back yard!

It's Official!

I'm a chicken mommy!
We are proud to say that we now are the proud parents of 19 baby chicks.

We had about half of the eggs hatch, and unfortunately, we have lost three along the way.

One of those was one of our four "special chicks", dubbed Leonard. Of course, Ben came up with this name. He couldn't walk straight and turned in circles when he tried to walk. Ben thought it was quite humorous. Me, not so much! We still have one Leonard that is not walking well, but the other two chicks, with the help of a bandaid, are doing great.

This little lady had a non responsive leg when she was born, but now she is walking like a champ.

Of course, we aren't going to keep all of these chicks. My coop is pretty large, but I think it will max out at 15 or 16 chickens. I would like to have several different breeds, so I will only keep 5 or 6 of these babies.

I have found that you can tell by some of their markings if they are males or females. I don't know how accurate this is, but they are supposed to be girlies if they have dark legs.

I think this little chica, is in fact, a chica! I think!

Also during my research, I discovered that I think my Dominique chickens may be Barred Rocks. They are confused often, and I think my chicken man may have been confused!!

This is the Dominique (or Dominecker)

http://www.purelypoultry.com/images/chickens/dominique.jpg

This is the Barred Rock

Not much difference, huh?

So my little ones are six days old, very messy, loud, and have already moved out of the house! They now reside in the garage. Those little independent chickies!