We are officially in the Chicken Business. I would post pictures except I can't seem to find my camera upload wire since I'm moved here. But the girls wanted me to tell EVERYONE that we got our first egg today!
It all started when we got home and the couple who had been living in our trailer home next door left their chickens behind. I had always wanted to get some chickens (It was my speciality in 4-H) but hadn't the time to set up pens or anything like I wanted. The couple had our old dog run set up over at their house as a chicken pen and had 3 Red Frizzle Cochins and 4 mutant hybrid scary barred cochins. One even has a deformed beak so it grows completely sideways on the top and straight on the bottom. Scary chicken, but needless to say Mason took one look at it and said That one is MINE! The kids would go out everyday and just sit by their chickens and watch them eat. The poor things were starved, their feathers completely falling out, their combs pale and very small. I thought they were just young still, until they told me they were 5 months old or so, and they just fed them table scraps and moldy bread.
So I took these mangy birds and started feeding them actual chicken food and the Frizzles have really feathered out well and I even found out I had rooster in the bunch after his growth and comb wasn't stunned anymore by lack of nutrition.
So from these 7 Mark and I decided we would go ahead and start the girls in 4-H. If we are feeding 7 chickens we might as well feed more, so we attended a National Poultry Show in Tucson Thanksgiving weekend. I was surprised how many faces I recognized, and also met quite a few new breeders. We came home with 10 Broilers (Yup, those are Lunch), 9 Columbian Rock Bantams (The owner might have 2 more, he sold his entire stock to me), a Trio of New Hampshire Red Bantams, 2 White Call Ducks (These are the Bantam Ducks), 1 Light Brown Dutch Rooster, 1 Rhode Island Red Bantam Rooster We Are still looking for the Partridge in the Pear Tree. Let me know if you see one.
I don't expect any of you to get as excited as my girls are over the variety and type of chickens we have, but they have become super responsible, feeding and watering them every day. They have even been non-pouty over us saying that the white broilers are Food, Not Friends. Taylor asked what the names were, and we said, "That one is Lunch, That one is Dinner, that one is Barbeque..." He has been calling them all BBQ now "I love Barbeque, My Favorite" and "Barbeque is so much cute!" I won't make my kids join in the butchering process at their ages now...
But about the egg! It's been almost 2 weeks, and knowing it was winter and they are all in metal cages, we didn't expect any eggs for a while, but Katrina came home and found the New Hampshire Hen had laid an egg. Now...Do we eat it or Hatch it?
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