Yes, we have more chickens….

Honestly, we haven’t lost our minds. We are just working to grow our homesteading efforts to provide more home grown food for us and our community. That effort includes raising meat birds for the first time.

Two weeks after the arrival of our 24 new layer chicks, we received a shipment of our 60 Husky Red Rangers. I’ll admit that the new arrivals have me a bit overwhelmed. We’ve had some challenges with the new chicks and we’ve had a larger loss than we expected over the weekend. We currently have 40 live chicks here after week one, and 10 of those have pasty butt.

No one tells you that, as a chicken farmer, you’ll possibly have to clean chicken’s butts, but here I am, at least once a day, doing just that. Carefully cleaning hardened chicken poo off of these little guy’s butts to make sure their vents stay clear to try to avoid the loss of more chickens.

In addition to the new arrivals, we made an investment in a new brooder to handle the large number of chicks. We are super thankful for Cackle Hatchery for their video on how to assemble the brooder as well as tips they provided around handling food and water for our chicks the first few days as they adapt to the new space.

The chicks will reside in the brooder until they are ready to be moved to our paddock where we have temporary coops set up for them. We plan to follow Cog Hill Farms method for raising meat birds in terms of Jason Smith’s concept around “no more chicken tractors“.

If you like to watch homesteading YouTube videos, you haven’t experienced joy until you meet the dancing farmer. I highly recommend checking out Cog Hill’s YouTube Channel for informative homesteading topics along with some light entertainment.

We’ll be posting updates on our overall chicken raising efforts as well as other farm activities and eventually some more general life in Puget Sound posts. At some point, we’ll have things settle down so we can take in some more hiking, but the farm comes first.