Spoke with a lovely young man last night who is looking for 60 at the moment, but he needs them a bit older, but hopefully he will contact me again towards the end of the year when he needs 200+

So our current flock are only 8.5 weeks old, and it looks like they will all be gone by early July, so next flock probably will be in early June!

Then my friend Debbie has got an incubator, and I bought 6 cuckoo Silkie eggs from Ebay, and took 6 Appenzelar eggs from our little trio we got the other week, and she is incubating them for us, but we have also taken the plunge and have ordered an incubator, but its coming from China!!!

How this all came about was, the other week I saw an advert on Lincspets4life.co.uk and a lady was trying to re-home some chickens, as her daughter hatches eggs that she buys from Ebay, then runs out of room to keep them, so we brought home this trio of Appenzellar Spitzhaubens.  Lovely looking chickens, but the cockeral keeps going for me.  I think though that he is only protecting his girls, and still doesn't associate me as being his new owner. 

We didn't know if he was performing, but Debbie has said that even after just a day when she candled the eggs, 4 of the 6 at least are fertile!!!!  And the other one we got from this lady was a lovely little cuckoo Silkie cockeral that they called Emily because it was so pretty, but I've re-named Enery, to prevent him getting a complex!!! So we bought the hatching eggs to try to give him some girlfriends!

Then a couple of weeks ago, we met Jason from www.archieslittlegems.co.uk in St. Neots, who breeds pure breeds, and he bought 50 of our Amberlink and Goldline chicks, and brought me up 6 Araucanas and 4 Exchequer leghorns.  Debbie bought 2 of the araucanas and she did have 2 of the leghorns, but we had them back as Deb thought they might be too much for her garden as they are very flighty at the moment.

We think maybe 3 of the 4 leghorns are cockerals though as they are much bigger than the 4th one.  Then there is a lady near Debbie who breeds Rhode Island Reds and Light Sussex amongst other breeds and we got 6 of each at a week old to rear, so hopefully we will get a good mix of hens there and later on can get a couple of nice unrelated cockerals.

So we are expanding into the pure breed market too,and now poor old hubby is having to build me yet another shed which will have 4 pens in for the breeding trios.

So watch this space, I really will try to be as up to date as possible, but the chicks still take a lot of my time as they are still trying to kill each other, and Friday morning, when I let them out, I'd lost another 9 as they had all decided to sleep in the same spot, about 5 chicks deep, so the ones on the bottom got crushed, and last night they were doing the same thing, so I was back out there at 10.30pm, separating them and putting them into 5 or 6 smaller groups around the big house.  Luckily as it was dark they stayed where I'd put them, so no losses this morning, but I am still losing the occasional one to severe pecking.

However, my friend and mentor John Harrison has a new book out on frugal living called Low Cost Living (and website to match www.lowcostliving.co.uk) and in the bit about chickens, he says that research shows that a chicken can only recognise 50 to 60 other hens, so you get more problems in larger flocks.  As we already have the big house divided into 2, we are going to divide it into 3 so have 3 smaller flocks and see if that helps stop them pecking.

We've tried everything else!

So, Watch This Space!!!!!!     And here are a few pics of the new girls and boys!!!

The Appenzellars who lay small white eggs!

Enery the Silkie

Exchequer Leghorns

Araucanas

Rhode Island Reds and light Sussex