Greetings from The Coop #2

This week is all about the eggs. Of course eggs are one of the main purposes of tending to a flock of chickens & ducks. Eggs are such a great source of protein and important part of a well balanced diet. But if you have been to the grocery recipes, you probably see how quickly the cost of eggs have skyrocketed recently. Now, I’m not going to try and spout off that you are going to save tons and tons of money by raising your own chickens (and ducks)… at least not right away. The initial buy in can be a bit much but if you actually spread that out of the life of the flock… eventually you are making a return.

We usually purchase egg laying chicks and ducklings either from the local feed stores (like Coastal, Wilco, Tractor Supply). We mail order our meat birds (only because you need a larger quality of the same type all relatively the same age). For the egg layers we like to have a variety of different chickens but mostly only ones that are expected to lay large to jumbo eggs. While easter eggers can be fun – will it be blue or will it be green today – they tend to be pretty small. But it’s more than just the birds that come at a cost. You need to have a coop and run for them to live in. You need to have feeders and feed. You need a source of water. If you want them to be doing any sort of “ranging” you will need to have a fenced in area (permanent or mobile, like a chicken tractor) and secondary shelter, for when the weather changes.

We recently made the switch to Fermented Poultry Feed. This is simple process that has done a world of good for our girls. The shells are stronger then ever. The girls are super happy and healthy – you can see from the bright red color of their comes as well as from how clean their eggs are when they lay them. To make fermented food, I use 4 gallon sized glass jars. Each day I add 5 scoops of 6-grain Hen Scratch and then fill a jar halfway with water and about a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. The jar lids have small holes drilled in them to allow the gases to escape while fermenting. The 4 jars go in rotation, so when I feed the oldest one to the chickens, I make the newest one.

We currently are getting between 8 and 10 eggs each day. We have one older gal that we think may not be laying anymore, but we are going to give her a little more time. And then we have the 4 babies – they are about 8 weeks old now – and almost ready to be added to the main coop. At the moment they are in the “brooder” which is a sort of chicken run inside of the chicken run. They are out with the others all day but when it’s time to sleep they go to their own spot until they are ready to be fully acclimated. So we get a lot of eggs – which means we eat Breakfast for dinner often. This particular recipe is one of our absolute favorites – Biscuits & Gravy Casserole

Meet the Girls:

Almost all of them have names (and they all start with ‘S’, which is a silly story), with the exception of the barred rocks and the speckled sussex. This is because we have 2 sets of 2 barred rocks (one we call the old twins and one we call the young twins) and a set of 2 speckled sussex that we just call both speckled, because honestly you cannot tell them apart. The rest are in groups. We have the ‘Singers’ – Shania, Shakira and Sally. We have the Firestarters (again a story for another day) – Smokey, Sparky and Sizzle. We then have Savvy – which we saved from a round of meat chickens, when we realized that she might not have been meant to be a meat chicken. And at the moment only one of our ducks is named – Sandy. The 3 ducklings we have are not yet old enough to know for sure if they are girls (egg layers) or boys (meat producers), so we won’t name them till we know for sure. But at the moment the names on the table are Spaghetti, Strawberry, Sage, Sasha and Sammy.

Do you or have your raised your own chickens? Do you have any questions you want answers or topics you would like to see me cover in this series?