As the chickens have grown (they are just under 8 weeks now) I’m not sure if my original estimate of how many roosters to how many chickens we have is correct. There are some that are definitely Roosters and some that are definitely hens, but then there are some that it could go either way. We are kind of waiting to see how their feathers continue to grow in and whether or not they get spurs.

While they were still in the brooder, I had moved them to an old box to clean it out. While I had done this, our border collie cross felt that she should stand guard…

Here are a couple more pictures from when they were still in the brooder…

We still have a little painting to do on the chicken coop that my husband and I built, but here is a picture of the finished building and run

There are a few with very distinct personalities. First there’s Gimpy. I really hope gimpy is a hen, but it’s one of the ones that we are not 100% sure about. Something happened to gimp’s leg. Not sure if it was broken as a young chick or if it was dislocated. When we noticed it, we were worried that Gimpy was in a lot of pain, but after watching him/her we think now it may have been a birth defect. He/she is always one of the first ones out of the coop in the morning, comes when called to get pet, and when we let the chickens out of the run into our yard, is always the first one out of the gate. Here is a picture of him/her on my knee. When I get a better picture of the leg, we will post it

All of the chickens are pretty friendly. There is one hen that my husband really likes, she is very friendly and comes when called. Here is a picture of him holding her. You can really tell how big they are getting

And finally a picture of them eating…

Now there are 3 chickens, one is a rooster, he is the runt of the litter, and I believe the other two are hens that have tried to protect him. He gets picked on because he is the runt, and that is the pecking order of chickens. I think the 2 hens get picked on as well because they try to protect him from the others. We noticed over a week ago that they were missing some feathers, so we took them out of the coop and put them back in the brooder to let their feathers grow back, We initially thought of lice or mites but we have checked them for that and they have none. Once their feathers were almost grown back in, we tried to put them back in the coop, but the other chickens (roosters and hens) started to pick on them right away. We are looking at building another coop for them with another run (we may utilize the old chicken coop and fence off a part that we are not using for the garden for them. We will be working on that this weekend.

Last night, we decided to take the chickens out of their run and let them into our yard to eat the grass. As they were out our dog sat with us. A couple of chickens were brave and walked right up to her. I had a firm grasp on her collar so just in case she couldn’t grab one. She did very good. When it was time to put them back into their run, we herded them up and even our dog jumped in a helped (Again I was hanging onto her collar just in case). but she did wonderful. Didn’t try to grab any of them, but she was very excited to be that close to them

Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I will be more diligent in putting up updates.

Right away I noticed that they like to jump up on on their water dish and go to the bathroom. So we made some adjustments to it and added a cut off 2L bottle upside down. see the pictures below

Our dog isn’t too sure what to think of them. She keeps running out there to check on them (or decide which she wants to eat for dinner lol).

They don’t make a lot of noise. Little chirps Looking at them I think we have 8 males and 17 females. I’ll post more on sexing chickens in another blog

Here they are:

First, we cleaned and disinfected the box. I wanted to make sure that the corners in the box were round instead of square. In the numerous things I have read, it says to do this so that the chicks can not smother each other in the corners and kill each other. From what I have been told, chicks tend to try to kill themselves all time. I completed this task by using 2 empty 2L bottles. After I washed these out, I cut the top and the bottom off to make the edges flat. Then I cut them in half, lengthwise. To hold them in place in the brooder, I stapled them into each of the four corners. If you look at the picture you can see what I mean

On the 9”x12″ cut out on the front, I covered the hole with chicken wire and stapled in place. I did this so the chicks would not be able to jump out. For the roosting sticks we took three bamboo sticks (I had these left over from my tomato plants in the garden). I cut these to the length of the box. Then I attached a 4×4 1″ thick piece of wood on each side of the box and attached the bamboo sticks to those. I also used 2 pieces of scrap wood to support the bamboo sticks in the middle. I didn’t attach these to the floor for really only one reason, to make it easier to clean. I can slide newspaper underneath them and I can move them around when the box has to be cleaned.

I used a couple of scrap pieces of 2×6 to raise the water and food dish *see my post on how I made the water and food dish out of items I recycled from around our house*    I’ve done this to raise the dishes off of the wood shavings and to keep them from going to the bathroom in their food and water.

We hung the red heat lamp from the lid and my husband wired it up to a thermostat that we installed inside the brooder. He also installed a light socket and hooked that up to a timer. He is so handy J 

Once everything was in place we covered the bottom in wood shavings. Now it looks like the brooder is all ready for the chicks, we just have to set it to the right temperature. We will leave the heat lamps on for a few days prior to getting the chicks. This should ensure that the brooder is warm enough for them when they arrive.

1 more sleep!

This is the view looking in:

For the water dish, I used an empty 4L milk container. I disinfected it and cut the bottom 2 inches off. I filled it to the top with white rocks, because I have read that the number one way chicks kill themselves is by drowning in their water dishes. If you fill the water dish with rocks or marbles then they can not drown themselves as easily. We’ll see if this is true!

For the feeder, we took an empty plastic Rogers coffee container. Along the bottom of it, my husband cut little openings for the feed to come out of.  I bent the plastic tab open so it would act as a stopper for the feed.

Over all it took us about 10 minutes to make both. It was quick, easy and didn’t cost us a thing!

A bit of history on our place. We live on a a few Acres on rural land surrounded by farmers and small towns that don’t even have a good local diner they are that small. There was a chicken coop already here when we moved in, but at the time we decided to turn it into a garden because we had never raised chickens before.

It wasn’t a very nice chicken coop to begin with so we are not losing out on much. It should be noted that we are using parts of the old coop for parts of our new one.

As we go through each step (building the coop,bringing the chicks home, and raising them to collecting their eggs) we will take you along for the ride:)

Keep checking back for updates and feel free to share your chicken raising story and tips too!

Cluck Hut.