Operation Chicken — round 2

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Spring2012 012[4]You may remember my last go at chickens in 2012 back in my city backyard with the awful neighbors. Mmm hmm. You may also remember that the only chickens that survived that experiment were the roosters I gave my mom (and I’m pretty sure they were eventually eaten by coyotes). Never one to learn lessons from a gruesome past, this spring I started thinking about chickens again.

Let me be very clear. There are people in this world that love chickens. My mom, for one. I am not such a person. What I love are farm fresh eggs, compost for the garden, and the idea of MAKE ALL THE THINGS. Having chickens means we can make eggs on site– and I like that a lot, even if the actual egg makers are not my favorite kind of critter.

So a few weeks back I started wondering if I should try chickens again. The #1 chicken killer in my life (Maggie) has passed on and this would be a good time to teach the puppy how to NOT kill chickens (gotta start them young). Suzie is certainly very capable of killing things but she’s getting older and tired and maybe, just maybe, we can work on her as well. (We’ll test that old dog, new trick theory). Regardless, there is no way this can be as bad as the in the city experiment with the neighbor situation and the kid next door breaking into my yard and messing with things.

I am also not considering free range chickens but rather chickens that live and graze in a coop. Yup, I am one of those cruel people who think containment is the way to do chickens and I feel pretty good about it (I also think it raises their chance of survival by a huge margin which raises the possibility of getting eggs out of them which is the whole point).

So there I was thinking about getting chicks again and concluding that I should probably get my head checked when my dear friend called “I’m getting chicks!! Is that crazy??” Her kids have longed for pets and raising chicks for a few weeks in the basement felt like a good trial run at pets for them. Awesome. I told her I had been considering trying chickens again and would happily take the chicks when they were too big for the basement. Brilliant.

Her kids told me all about them and their names. Are you ready for this? One of them is named Daisy, after my dog Daisy. That’s right. Suddenly I’m not sure there is any way for this to go well… and yet, we’re going to give it a try. Why not, right??

I’m picking up my old coop (that has been used by two different families in the last two years and is now vacant). We’ll be moving the chicks over this weekend. Stay tuned on this next adventure….

In case you want to read up on my last attempts at chicken keeping: