Hot chicks
Friday, March 27, Aaron and I swung by our local Farm and Home Supply and bought 8 chicks plus all the stuff we needed to get started with them. (It will probably not surprise you to find out that the total cost of the chicks was less than the total for all the other stuff.) It’s legal in Quincy to keep chickens, and it’s something we’ve been wanting to do. We want to keep chickens when we eventually move out to the country, so we might as well start small, now, and at least get a head start on that particular learning curve.
The cute little fuzzballs are in a comfy box right now out in the garage with a 250 watt lamp keeping them warm (keeping them in the house with a cat and a dog was just not realistic!). We’ll be raising them to live in the backyard, and they’ll eventually start laying eggs. I wanted all different kinds, so we got 8 different breeds. Seven are pullets (hens), and one is a mystery chicken – we won’t know if it is a male or female until it gets older. I thought about getting a rooster just because they are more colorful than the hens, so I might be happy no matter what gender it is. Hopefully if it is a rooster it will be a nice quiet gentle one so we won’t have any problems with the neighbors (whose barking dogs would probably be considered more disruptive than a rooster anyway).
In case you’re interested, the breeds we got were: Ameraucana (Easter Egg chicken), Barred Rock, Black Australorp, Buff Laced Polish, Buff Orpington, Cinnamon Queen, New Hampshire Red, and White Leghorn. Farm and Home orders their chicks through Cackle Hatchery, so if you’d like to read more about the breeds, you can visit their website.
And here are pictures of our chicks! I’m amazed at how much they’ve grown in just a few days, although you really can’t tell in the pictures. None of them (I think) were day old chicks. I believe they all had been at Farm and Home for at least a few days, and some for a few weeks, which accounts for their various sizes. Click on the pictures to see a bigger version, which also makes it easier to read the text identifying the breeds.
The 8 chicks, in their box on their first day home (March 27)
The chicks on March 30.
(I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist using the title “Hot chicks” for this post. I often shock people when I refer to women as “chicks” so I wanted to use the word, for once, when I was actually referring to chickens!)
Uncategorized | Angel | 
March 31, 2009 1:40 pm
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Other Links to this Post
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Chickens, etc. | Commentarii Mei — March 31, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
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Update on the peeps | Divine Mind — June 15, 2009 @ 8:16 pm
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