First Flock, Flops, N'at

It's spring and you know what that means...PEEPS!

They're cute and fuzzy and you instantly want to take 20 of them home but I would be lieing if I said it was love at first sight for me; in fact, far from it. I wanted nothing to do with chickens. We were living in California when I had my second daughter Emily. I was figuring out a new baby that was sick and had a 19 month old toddler at home to entertain. Dave decided he and Chelsea should build a chicken coop to help keep a busy kiddo occupied outside and I was not at all interested in adding another thing to take care of at the time. He convinced me egg laying chickens would be low maintenance and in turn give our family a sustainable food source so I reluctantly agreed (honestly, I hadn't slept in a week so I'm certain that helped wear me down). And that is how it all began...one tired mom, a dad who can build things, and some Tractor Supply chickens.

Dave was absolutely correct that egg laying chickens are about as low maintenance animal as you are going to get on a farm which was the perfect one to ease us into homesteading. We didn't really put a ton of thought into what breed of birds we wanted, how we would manage maintaining a productive laying flock, or how to decrease predator loss beyond a fenced in run. The chickens we originally started with had a tendency to go broody (meaning, they wanted to be mamas) which is great if you intend to grow your flock but the trade off is lower production and territorial behavior during that period of time. We would often turn our chickens out to forage during the day and let them back in at night to roost. Surprisingly, we had few predator losses while free ranging them. We did, however, lose a few chickens to hawks and a single raccoon polished off almost our entire initial flock. The sneaky bandit would climb over the chicken run fencing at night, snag a bird from inside, and chew off only its head underneath the coop (As promised, I won't be sugar-coating the realities of homesteading 🫣). This went on for almost a week until Dave heard it in the early morning hours and found it mid meal. This raccoon was as long as a full size shovel and mean as a rattlesnake. We had no idea raccoons were something we needed to be concerned about. To add to this party, COVID was full throttle so everyone and their brother rushed to Tractor Supply to buy chickens. I ended up buying a straight run of birds because that's all that was available and that led to our next bit of fun (I'll get to that in a minute).

We happened to have a broody hen at the time which we used to our advantage. Broody hens want to be moms, we needed to introduce new chicks to an established flock, and we were able to solve two problems at once. Introducing new birds to a flock is a thing...you can't just put new babies or mature birds in a new flock without some transition. Think of it like this. You've lived your entire life with the same five people in your home. All of a sudden, five more people move in and start moving your tools or putting the dishes away in the wrong place. It would ruffle your feathers and it's no different for chickens. I'm all about using mother nature to do my work, so we had our broody hen adopt our peeps and protect them from the existing hens. We placed a couple ceramic eggs underneath our mother-to-be and let her sit on them for about a week. Dave snuck into the coop after all the ladies were tucked in for the night, removed the eggs, and placed the day old chicks underneath her. And voila, chicken surrogacy at it's finest. Now, this worked out for us because we happened to have a very good mother hen; however, not all broody hens are good mothers. Maybe it was beginners luck but it worked and we ended up with FOUR roosters (remember, I could only get a straight run and the probability of getting roosters is about 50%...we are over-achievers so our straight run was 70% rooster and 30% hens). I didn't have the heart to cull the roosters but over time, the jagoffs (Pittsburghese meaning jerks) absolutely brutalized our hens. The gift of knowledge, experience, and hindsight taught us our ratio of roosters to hens was WAY too high. After one rooster got particularly brave and pinned my sweet little Emily to the ground attacking her, I had no remorse culling (ie. farm to table if you catch my drift) all four the next morning. We have not done a straight run for an egg laying flock or kept a rooster since. Don't get me wrong, roosters have their advantages when done correctly but with small kids and limited need to propogate a flock, we have avoided them. I also don't need to wake up to a rooster's crow...I have 3 kids to fulfill that need.

So where are we today?

I'm so glad yinz asked! We bought our 10 acre property outside of Pittsburgh in November of 2020. Our hause (that's not a typo, that's Pittsburghese for house...gotta get the ah in hause) had a non-functioning barn and that was about it. The very first thing we built was a chicken hause. There's something about a chicken coop that immediately made it feel like home. A lot of planning went into how big it would be, how many runs we would have, how we would protect them from predators etc. Our current flock was selected based on the following criteria: potential for broodiness, friendliness, food efficiency, egg color (colored eggs are more marketable) and size. It's time to revitalize our flock production which means thinning out our older hens and introducing new peeps...such is the circle of life on the farm. We are also ready for our spring batch of broiler birds which is my personal favorite. I can NEVER go back to store bought chicken. And I do mean never.

Now that I've shared some of our "lessons learned," what's next?

I could talk about chickens until the cows come home so I will need to break it down into a two part series. The first series will focus on egg laying chickens: insights on building your own chicken coop/predator protection, feeding and foraging, breed selection, raising peeps, introducing new birds to an existing flock (follow us as we do this to revitalize our flock), and the wonderful world of eggs. The second series will focus on raising meat birds (and I LOVE my meat chickens). We specialize in cornish cross but are planning to try new breeds this year as well. I will walk you through the process from peep to freezer and explain how I use every bit of the chickens we process (including the feet... trust me, you'll thank me later). I will also show you how we include our three young kids in every aspect of raising meat birds and how it taught them the valuable life lesson of not wasting food.

First up: Choosing the right adorable peeps for your hause and what to do with them once yinz get home!