“Chickens are farm animals, not pets.” I should make myself repeat that 3 times a day until I convince myself of it. But it is hard for me to keep that in mind. I enjoy having the hens follow me around the yard as I garden. They come up and look to me for treats, just like the dog. They come when I call them “chook, chook, chook.” Penguin and Miss Prissy (formerly Greasy Chicken) both hop on my lap…
Cochin hens make great foster mothers. My cochins don’t seem mind that they are not the biological mothers of the new chicks because they give them love and care as if they were their very own. The chicks arrived at the post office early Thursday. We brought them inside the house to our back bathroom, where I set up a brooder with a heat lamp ahead of time. They spent the remainder of the day eating and drinking. I also…
“Broody” is the term used for chickens when females go through a hormonal change that causes them to want to sit on eggs and hatch them. Typically they growl or fluff up their hackles to tell people and other chickens to leave them alone with their nest of eggs. It normally takes 21 days for a hen to hatch eggs, so I waited that long to see how they would do. At the beginning of the year, I gave Harley…
If you are a stanch supporter of PETA or a vegetarian, please skip this post. Over the last two weeks, I have been asked multiple times what I do with the roosters that we raise when we have straight run bantam chicks. What happens to roosters can be a touchy subject with new comers to keeping backyard chickens, but it is something most folks that raise chicks, not just people like me that like to raise bantams chicks, will probably…
I waded through a lot of the different Poisonous Plant lists when I first got a baby tortoise from a friend in 2004, and then again when I got chickens. Some of the lists were misleading by making no distinctions between a toxic plant that causes rashes and one that will kill my pets if they eat it. Through my research, I realized I actually grew a large number of plants in my yard that are considered toxic, but I…
I love this photo and had to share. One of the best things about keeping Cochins is they really enjoy being mothers. When they are broody, they will easily accept foster chicks or will hatch fertile eggs. Harley adopted a few feed store Buff Orpingtons and Penguin sat on 3 Trader Joes eggs and hatched out a leghorn pullet. The mothers insured the babies were safely integrated into the flock and protected them. I am a softy for chicks…
A local Long Beach watering hole, Joe Jost’s, claims to have sold 6,000,000 Spicy Pickled eggs since 1934. My husband has eaten his fair share of that number. He loves to cook and this was the first thing he said he was making when we got chickens. Since 2009 we have been making these at home. We like spicy pickled eggs so much, that rather than immediately start eating the Bantams’ eggs when they started laying, I set the eggs…
The chickens get access to the majority of my backyard for free ranging, but now a days you would not realize it just glancing around the yard. The first few months with chickens free ranging, the yard didn’t look as good as it did in the years before chickens. With a few months of all day free ranging, there was poop on the concrete, plants uprooted or heavily munched, and holes in the lawn. Over time I have learned and…
I would love to one day have a hobby farm, but where our home is located, we are probably in the best place we could be for our family based on our neighbors and the convenience to many things in walking or biking distance. According to a website called www.walkscore.com our exact address scores an 83, which is not far behind dense downtown places like New York City and San Francisco. We will continue to make the best of it…
It was a Happy Thanksgiving this year…two of the Cochins started laying eggs the day before, at 22 weeks and 2 days old. The partridge bantam cochin, Harlequin, and Penguin, the Black Bantam Cochin, both laid their first eggs that day and have been laying steady ever since. As of today, we are up to 29 eggs. The eggs were 1.0 oz and 1.1 oz. In the 2 1/2 weeks they have been laying, the eggs have increased to 1.3…