You've decided to raise chickens and like lots of chicken keepers you want to start with chicks instead of already grown hens and roosters. It's more fun after all! Learning how to raise chicks comes with a little bit of a learning curve though. Baby chicks need special food, a waterer they won't drown in, a heat source and a special home till they are big enough to move out to the chicken coop. Don't worry...it's actually easier than it sounds.
There are many reasons why you might decide to raise chicks. Many people want to raise hens for eggs or want their children to learn where food comes from. Also kids can learn a lot from the responsibility of caring for chickens without having a pet inside the house. Starting with chicks is a cute way to do this, though they usually do end up in the house till they get bigger.
It feels like backyard chickens are the newest thing and that suddenly everyone is raising them. Not only are our friends keeping chickens now, but we're seeing them in movies and on television more and more. However, chickens have been popping up in movies and on TV for years. In fact, they have been used as everything from background scenery, to the main actor!
Most recently chickens were introduced in an episode of The Conner's when Jackie wanted a chicken coop in the backyard for eggs. Young Sheldon is another recent series that has chickens. The neighbors keep them and they are often in scenes. Lost In Space has Debbie the chicken in their most recent season. There are even chickens in prison in Orange is the New Black!
It's not just television. Movies have been seeing a surge of chicken actors too! Most recently there are chickens in the scene when Kevin James's character is learning to fight in Here Comes The Boom. Commercials are cashing in on the trend too. Who can forget the bobbing head chickens from the Mercedes commercial? As you can see, chickens are used in lots of media these days!
The Silkie chicken is one of America's favorite chickens! They are known to be gentle with children and great mama hens, often raising several clutches a year. Plus, they are super cute and fluffy! Their popularity as a pet had led me to have silkie chickens for sale at my farm for over 10 years!
There are lots of reasons that you should raise silkie chickens, but of course with the pros come the cons. While their fluffy feathers are super soft, they can also get messy and cause other problems. Since they are so small they need low nest boxes and often pile on the floor to sleep at night. They also have problems when it rains and a few other issues...
It's winter, the hens aren't laying as much as they usually do and you need to buy eggs from the store. Now that you are super spoiled on the amazing taste of farm fresh eggs...which eggs should you buy at the store? Hopefully you have a farmers market near you and you can get some backyard chicken or small farm eggs from there. What if you're stuck with shopping at the grocery store? Which eggs are best?
There are so many different types of eggs on the grocery store shelves. Free range, cage free, pasture raised, with Omega 3's, white, brown and even fertile eggs! It can be really confusing especially when you don't know what the regulations behind the labeling are and how that actually translates into the treatment of the hens. After all, now that we raise our own chickens we want that fresh egg taste from hens that are treated well. Right?
So let's discuss what all these labels mean, the differences between them and which ones actually mean happy hens and not battery hens in cages!
This blog covers a lot of chickens keeping topics! I like to try to cover all aspects of raising chickens from the difficult to the easy. So many things can happen when raising chickens from baby chicks to adults. There are coop issues, health problems, things to build and buy and chicken predators to deal with. I write about it ALL! Well, I write about everything that happens here on my chicken farm! I won't write about things I haven't experienced. Who would?
So every year this blog is basically an online diary of what's going on season by season. Every year certain posts stand out from the crowd. Sometimes they're new and sometimes they're older, so you may or may not have seen these before! All the posts on this list though were chosen because they got the most visitors reading them in 2019.
Here is the top 10 most read posts about raising chickens from last year.
