Our Chickens

The coop the girls and I built.

For me, the final thing to do, in order to bring our lives completely back to normal in our house, is to acquire new chickens.  For those of you that have read my blog awhile or read old posts you may know we decided to move to Arizona and unfortunately we were plagued by strange events that kept us from making that move.  Eventually I had to sit back and take stock and realize that perhaps this move, quite simply, wasn't meant to happen for us.  Again.

I loved that we were able to try out tiny house living for a year and we had a ball, most of the time, in making that work.  We totally planned to give it another year until our tenant informed us she could no longer pay rent and I decided we should probably move back into our house rather than find another tenant.  It just made better sense and as it turned out, our home was in deep need of some TLC making it, in my opinion, un-rentable to anyone in its condition at the time.

Our tenants had been thrilled at the prospect of raising chickens and we agreed to leave them rather than re-home them elsewhere.  Apparently the novelty must have worn off because a few months before I evicted them they got rid of the hens.  I was sick about it, but they were theirs to do with as they saw fit.  Of all the decisions I've made and all the trials we dealt with my only regret is that our chickens paid the price.  No one spoils their chickens more than we do or at least that is how we think about it.  We consider them family members.

Edith

Recently we all agreed, as a family, that raising hens was important to us.  Every bit as important as putting our home back together and getting settled in.  We also want to successfully raise a vegetable garden and get things set up how we used to have.  The chickens are a big part of that process.

A few weeks ago I super cleaned up our old dog crate and washed all of the feeders in preparation.  My youngest and I cleaned up the coop and spread all of the composted manure in the planting beds which I turned over and raked smooth.  In a couple months the beds will be planted.

We acquired four pullet chicks and you all know by now that we lost half of them.  We even lost the extra one they gave us.  But with the feed store's encouragement and our own resolve we took home two more and so far, so good.

I plan to rake out the run area and add new sand for them to scratch around in and help with mud in the wet season.  By the first of May they will be ready to move in and take over.

I expect they'll be laying eggs by the end of summer and I have plenty of people who want to buy our extras.  My hope is to sell enough eggs to pay for their feed which will make them pretty much self sustaining.

How many of you out there raise chickens?  Or want to?