CHICKENS. — annie hauser

So turns out, I am SUPER obsessed with my chickens. Hi, I’m a chicken lady now. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

On New Year’s Day, I preordered 10 baby chicks to come from Alchemist Farm (they are a small family farm that is passionate about humane breeding and sustainable farming!) - I chose chicks that could be sexed before coming to us, meaning they would pretty much for sure be hens and not roosters! We ended up with Azure Eggers and German Bielefelder!

At the same time, I ordered our coop from Rita Marie’s Chicken Coops - we went with a coop and run combo. Honestly, we thought we wanted just a few chickens, but I know myself, and ordered a coop big enough for quadruple that 🤪 prob could have gone even bigger 😂😂

They were awesome to work with, answered all my new chicken lady questions, and helped me customize everything we needed.

We knew the chicks and coop were coming at the beginning of April, so we had plenty of time to figure out everything else. BTW chickens are really freakin easy .

A few weeks before the Alchemist Farm chicks were due to arrive, quarantine started and I panic bought four chicks from Tractor Supply 😅 they are Isa Browns and we named them Lavender, Jade, Sage, and Spruce. We can’t tell them apart anymore and stopped naming chickens bc they all kinda look the same - sorry girls. 💁🏻‍♀️

We got a big stock tank from Tractor Supply, some pine chips, water and food containers, and a heat plate for the chicks. I know most people just use a red bulb heat lamp, but the fire hazard plus rowdy kids made me nervous.

We added probiotics and electrolytes to the chicks water, and eventually started alternating batches with oregano oil or apple cider vinegar. Once they were two weeks old we switched to nipple waterers so they didn’t make such a mess! We use New Country Organics for their food. I always made sure they had a little bowl of grit to eat.

I cleaned their brooder about once a week. We took the chicks to the bathroom and the kids hung with them (supervised, obvi, lol) and snuggled. I would use a shovel and scoop all the old pine chips out, and then spray it down with Thieves Cleaner and wipe out. New pine chips down, used the Coop Spray from Oil+Glass book, fresh water, topped their food off, and put the heater back in! It took me like 10 mins max!

They stayed in our house for about 5 weeks, once they were fully feathered. Once the chicks from Alchemist Farm came (13 of them!!) - we also kept them in the house, but we moved them out to the coop a little sooner bc they were so dusty and I was over it! HA. Our coop has electric so we put a flat panel heaters out there for them! We moved the “little girls” to the coop and kept them in a wire dog pen inside the coop so they could get comfy around the bigger girls first. After about two weeks, I let them all out in the run together. There was a little normal pecking order stuff, but they got along great!

So I like to make my chicken life suuuper easy and simple - and clean - otherwise I will get real tired of it. So, I have big 5 gallon nipple waterers in the run, and a big food container so that everything stays clean and I don’t need to fill them daily. We used sand in the run, and we love it. (There is great info on that in this book - it was my fave for beginner chicken stuff!)
In the coop, I use the pine flakes on the floor. Under the roost, I have cookie sheets with this recycled coffee ground bedding (Power By Coffee) from Tractor Supply (it’s been out of stock for a while!) and then I go in every few days with a cat litter scoop and it takes me literally 2 minutes to clean! Since I started doing that, I give the coop a good clean where I replace all the pine flakes about once a month. I use the Coop Spray after I clean it the trays every few days.

I kept the nest boxes blocked off until we had our first girl lay us an egg! I didn’t want the hens sleeping in the nest boxes - bad habit! Once the girls started laying, I removed the boards blocking the boxes, and put nest pads down, added some fake eggs so they knew where to lay, and I spruced them up with some dried lavender and rose for my girls!

We ended up getting 13 more chicks from Alchemist Farm a few months later - I am on a mission for lots of beautiful colored eggs and chickies. It’s kind of an obsession HA. Chicken math is REAL guys. These babes were sold straight-run, meaning some may be roosters, we won’t know until they are a bit older! We have 3 Moss eggers, 2 Welsummers, 3 Cocoa Eggers, and 5 French Black Copper Marans. They are gorg and so much fun! It was warmer when they arrived, so their brooder was in the garage. Less dusty :)