New Chickens!

  Kevin and I went back and forth about it...should we get more chickens?  If so, should we raise chicks?  Or buy adult chickens?  (This is of course in response to our great Chicken Massacre of 2 weeks ago.  See previous Chickens post  for details.)

 Chicks are fragile, and require a high and steady temperature.  They also need to be under cover and are VERY stinky.  Adult hens are great in that they are already laying or will lay soon -- but sometimes the transition in location and food type shakes them up, and they don't lay well for awhile.

  We decided to go in between.  On Wednesday, a local seller sold us 15 9 week old Golden Comet pullets.  Golden Comets are great layers. They are charming, though not amazingly interesting birds.  We considered buying some Auracaunas as they had some of those to sell too -- but the Auracaunas were only 4 weeks old, and they wouldn't have done well with much larger, 9 week old Golden Comets.  (Auracauanas are so called "Easter Egg" chickens -- they lay pretty colored eggs.)

  Kevin built a coop for our meat chickens last year, so we put the pullets into it for now.  Our adult laying hens would probably beat up the 9 week old pullets and we don't want that.

 So now we have 2 batches of chickens in our back yard, plus an amazing amount of color coordination.  (Check out the red barn, the red main coop, and the red small coop.)

  Here is a better view of our new flock.  Cute, aren't they?