The Chickens

In May 2011, we began our Chicken adventure.  Why?  We are still wondering that.  Actually, we had heard of other people in the area with backyard flocks and we thought, why not? We would have fresh eggs and fertilizer for the garden (boy, were we right about that one). We started out with 3 chickens.  Henny, Penny and Candy.  Candy turned out to be a rooster, so back he went to the farm.  We replaced him with 2 more chickens, Nutter-Butter and Robin.  Again, Robin turned out to be a rooster, so back to the farm he went.  We replaced him with 2 more chickens, Daisy and Mei Mei, bringing our flock to 5.  Things we have learned.  Our son loves the chickens.  He talks to them, feeds them, collects eggs and tells everyone about them.  The girls are pretty social.  They follow us around the yard, hoping for treats.  So far, we have been letting them free range it during the day.  We have also learned that chickens poop, a lot, in very inconvenient places. For this reason, our project before we start the spring garden is going to be to convert our side yard into a chicken run.  The girls will have plenty of room to run around, and we won't be cleaning our shoes so much.  More on that later.

This is where our girls call home.

This is Penny, one of our original chickens.  She is a Cinnamon Queen (also called a sex-link).  We have 4 other chickens.  Henny, a Cinnamon Queen, Nutter-Butter, a Buff Orpington, Daisy, an Ameraucana, and Mei, Mei, a Silver Laced Wyndotte.  

 Mei, Mei is too young to lay yet so we get 3-4 eggs a day from the other 4 chickens.  Daisy, the Ameraucana lays blue green eggs, but my picture does not do the color justice.  The ceramic egg carton is from Anthropology and was a Christmas present from my sister-in-law.

(this image came from Amazon.com)

I bought this book for my son because the chickens on the cover look like Henny and Penny.  We also found the names for Daisy and Mei Mei from this book.  Jan Brett's illustrations are so detailed and beautiful!