Disclaimer: These are not my eggs…er…um…our chicken’s eggs rather. 😉 A friend gifted them to us. They are French Copper Maran eggs, and I may just need a hen or two like this.
When we moved, years ago, we started out with just shy of five acres. In the Ozarks…five acres is a farm…so we had a few feet to go. Since then when have added more acreage and have a farm of about sixteen and a half acres. Just enough for us. We have a few head of cattle, a few goats, a donkey, a miniature horse, chickens, and dogs and cats. Our farm has grown over the last few years. This may actually be a sort of warning to you. We started with chickens.
Chickens are addicting. We started by ordering those little balls of fluff from the feed store. Do you have Chick Days in your neck of the woods? Well…we do. We raised them in the garage…caring for them and wiping their little hineys if needed. (It’s so much easier to have a momma lay the eggs, hatch them, and take care of her own kids.) Even though we would order all pullets, except one, we would usually wind up with a few roosters in the mix. The excitement came when it was time to turn them out into their brand new chicken yard. They were so cute running around out there.
We now have a wide assortment and even some little Polish gals with the wild “hair.” My brother gave us those and they are so sweet. Such good tempered hens. We get lots of enjoyment out of our chickens. They are fun to watch in the summer evenings, before they go to bed. When you have your own chickens, as long as they aren’t molting and are laying steady, you always have something to eat. I remember my delight in skipping the egg cooler at the grocery store. I felt very self-sufficient. lol!
I think that it’s wonderful how farming is catching back on in this generation. We live in a very rural community, so it has always been a way of life around here. All of our grandparents farmed at some point. You actually don’t go very far here without running into a farmer of some sort. Even folks that don’t have any stock, or live in town, a lot of them raise a garden. That is some of the toughest farming that there is. Some folks even raise a tomato plant or two in a five gallon bucket. I love that. I love to see the light in their eyes when they talk about how well their “crop” has done. We raise a pretty good sized garden here and I preserve lots of things. It’s one of my favorite things about country life.
Did you know that you don’t have to live out in the sticks to raise a few chickens? Of course you did! I believe, in our town, that you can have hens but not roosters and there is a limit on how many. So even if you don’t want a lot of acreage to farm and take care of, you can still have a few hens to lay eggs for your family.
Our chickens are big scrap eaters. That makes me feel great! I hate wasting things, so even the vegetable scraps or leftovers…the chickens go nuts over. They love old fruit and things like that too. We even feed them our old pumpkins after Thanksgiving. It is rumored in the organic community that this helps with worming the chickens.
I hope that if you are thinking of adding chickens to your farm that this has encouraged you. We enjoy ours so much and are very thankful for them actually. It’s funny how all of these critters just seem to be a part of your family after awhile. This farm life…it’s so much deeper than some realize. It speaks to your heart in ways that you never imagined. God is good to do things like that for us.
Love from the Farmhouse,
