New to the Flowertown Charm Farm
We are so excited to announce that we have 9 new family members! We decided to add to our little farm by getting 9 baby chicks! So why chickens? Why did we get our goats first before the chickens? And what do we plan to do with them? Well, I will answer all those questions for you in my 9 reasons to get backyard chickens!
What Encouraged Us To Get Chickens
My husband spoils me by making me breakfast pretty much every day, and it almost always has eggs involved. I also bake and cook a lot, so we eat a lot of eggs! Right now we buy farm fresh eggs from a local farmer, Cathy Shill, who has over 200+ chickens, and we buy 3 dozen from her every other week and have so for the past 2 years. We knew eventually we wanted our own chickens so we could collect our own eggs and provide for ourselves, just like we want to do with the goat’s milk, and our garden, so here we are! It has been so nice to have made a chicken friend to go to for advice to get us ready, and Cathy is awesome. If you live near Summerville and want fresh eggs, definitely get them from her! Here is her facebook page. So if you have ever thought about getting chickens like us, here are 9 reasons to talk you into it!
9 Reasons to Get Backyard Chickens
1- EGGS, EGGS, EGGS!
When you raise your own chickens, your eggs can be so much healthier, rewarding, and give you a sense of pride knowing you provided your own food from your own backyard. We are choosing to feed our chickens organic feed, (after their medicated starter chick feed), lots of greens and foraging, and not to use chemicals, etc, for our flock. That should provide us with happy healthy chickens that lay eggs with an orange yolk! Did you know healthy yolks are actually a deep orange color, NOT YELLOW? This site has the perfect example if you don’t believe me! click here. Not to mention the eggs will be so much fresher!
2- No Need for a Rooster
Many people think that in order to have chickens, you have to wake up at 4 am every day to a loud, obnoxious, rooster! That my friends, is false. Hens, (lady chickens), will lay an egg almost every day with or without a rooster around. BUT, if you want baby chicks to hatch from those eggs, then you need a rooster man to fertilize those eggs. So we have 9 hens, and no rooster.
3- Easy to Care For
Chickens out of all the farm animals, are essentially the easiest to take care of. All they basically need is a secure home (coop) to sleep in, a yard (run) to exercise and scratch in, and food and water. And a loving owner to collect the eggs of course!
4- Inexpensive to Own
Chickens really do not cost that much, they are just a couple dollars from your local feed store, and their monthly feed is maybe $15 for a small flock. If you already have a shed or barn, that can be converted into their coop, then that’s free! Or new coops can be purchased for $200+. Not too bad considering just one chicken will lay 300+ eggs a year for you! For 8-12 years!
5- Entertainment & Relaxation
If you are animal lovers like us, you will love to just sit and watch the chickens! They just bring a smile to your face with their corky head movements, funny clucks, and unique personalities each chicken will have! I already don’t want to leave the room I have these babies in, they are so cute to watch! I am writing this post just watching them chirp and cuddle!
6- Not Long Until the First Egg
It only takes 5 months to get your first egg from baby chicks! They mature quickly and then will provide you eggs for the next 8-12 years depending on the breed. That is why we chose to get goats first because they take at least 1.5 years to get to the first milking. So we figured let’s get started on the goats first, then by time they are “kidding” (goats having babies) to provide us milk, our chickens would be laying eggs, and we will be enjoying the fruit from our labor! All about timing!
7- Almost Anyone Can Own Chickens
Many people believe that they cannot own chickens because of the law, or their HOA. In some big cities that is still true, but many towns and HOA’s do allow for chickens in a limited amount, just no roosters! And if you read #2, you know you do not need a rooster to get some yummy eggs! So take a look at your ordinances and find out! We are literally in the middle of the city, and we have our little farm!
8- A Breed for Everyone & 9-Easter Eggs
There are sooooo many different chicken breeds! There are meat chickens, laying chickens, and ornamental chickens. We knew we did not have the heart for meat chickens, so we chose all laying hen and ornamental breeds. We also knew we wanted each chicken in our flock to be different, so we got 9 different types of hens! Not only do different breeds look unique, but they also can lay different colored eggs!! We wanted our egg basket to look like an easter egg basket, so we chose our breeds based on friendliness, cuteness, and egg color!
How We Got Them
We decided to get our chicks by mail, so we could get all the breeds we wanted, which would be too hard to find sources locally. We ordered them from mypetchicken.com and if you want to see that each chick will look like grown up, click on their breed name! Especially check out the silkie!! My favorite!!!!
Here are the 9 chicks we got, their breed, names, and egg color;
Jelly Bean the Blue Ameracauna (blue eggs)
Skittles the Easter Egger (green eggs)
Snickers the Mille Fleur D’Uccle (little cream eggs)
Peaches the Salmon Faverolle (salmon eggs)
Licorice the Black Copper Maran (copper eggs)
Lavender the Lavender Orpington (light brown eggs)
Marshmallow the White Silkie (little white eggs)
Oreo the Silver Laced Wyandotte (brown eggs)
Cupcake the Mottled Cochin (little brown eggs)
Well, my friends, I hope you enjoyed our new chickie babies! We are so happy to finally have them here, and we set up their little brooder in our sunroom, where they will live for the next 6 weeks or so! Meanwhile, we are taking on a HUGE project to build their coop (mansion)! We bought plans, but of course, the designer in me reconfigured over half of it, so we are building it from scratch, and wish us luck we finish in time!! I will share a tour of that in a future blog post!
So, with those 9 reasons to get backyard chickens, do you want a flock of backyard chickens now?!
Here are most of the products we bought to get us started!