Our New Flock is Producing!

I went out to tuck the girls in for the night and found a small brown egg in the nest box. Oh what joy when they start to lay!. My last hens quit laying last fall and never really recovered after a molt despite a long rest and even some Feather Fixer feed.

We all know 2020 has been a challenging year and that was true for poultry keepers as well. I tried to order new chicks about the same time the meat processing plants were shutting down over Covid concerns. Murray MacMurray Hatchery said I was out of luck. They had a flood of orders and were out of layers. Wow! I wonder how all the new farmers are doing right now. I was able to get a flock of mixed brown egg layers a few months later. It was odd because I was riding in the car and I find that very boring so I shopped for chickens and there they were. There still wasn’t much selection and I took what I could get.

They arrived mid-June. I was out of space for them as I had ordered meat birds as well, but was told the chicks could not all be shipped out at the same time. I ended up getting a shipment of chicks every week for three weeks. Yuck! Now chickens just don’t take to having new coop guests move in. They can be cannibalistic at even a young and fluffy age. The first two groups were meat chickens and they did fine but they were not going to take to the next shipment of layers. By then the older birds were at least two weeks old. I Still had my old layers in the coop so the meat birds were then moved out of the grain room and into their chicken tractor outside. It was still cold enough that I covered the cage with a tarp and kept a heat lamp on the tiny fluff balls. The baby layers could then take over the grain room.

Now the meat birds are in the freezer and the new layers are in the coop with the few older hens that were willing to accept their new friends. It was quite a summer trying to give all of them enough space. And we have our fist egg! I’m so happy. Hopefully there will be plenty to sell soon as well.