Well, this is my first ever blog, so you will have to bear with me until I know what I'm doing! I should have started this blog last week, so I'd better begin by bringing you all up to date!

How It All Started

Last year hubby and I decided we wanted to keep chickens again, after a couple of years of buying supermarket eggs. Believe me, once you have eaten fresh eggs produced by your own chooks, you will never want to eat supermarket eggs again, even the free range and so called organic ones!

So we heard about the Battery Hen Welfare Trust and contacted their local area co-ordinator.
We started with 50 chickens last September. We lost some over the next 6 months, so bought another 20 at Easter. We'd had ex free range chickens before, but never ex battery. The poor things, some of them were nearly bald, some could hardly walk, and it wasn't until we got them home and put them into their new house that we realised they had never seen grass or the sky before. It was 2 days before they would come out of the house, and when they did, they were either walking around looking up at the sky, or lifting their feet up and looking down as they had never seen grass before either!!

As I said, some of them didn't last very long, as they are so stressed when they are in the battery cages, 4 or 5 to one cage, fighting for space, pecking each other. It was wonderful to see them all acting like real chickens again.

It was good at first as we were getting 4 dozen eggs a day from them, and what we couldn't eat were given to friends and family, and then workmates started to buy them. So the money from the egg sales bought their food, and we got free eggs, so they at least were self supporting!

Then word got aound and people in the village started to pop round and buy some. By this time, they had started to moult and some are now nearly 3 years old. Battery chickens aren't bred to have long lives, so now we are only getting 4-8 eggs a day.

The New Girls!

We decided to add some younger chickens to our flock, so we bought 12 point of lay chooks from a local lady rearer, 6 are brown Bovans Goldlines and 6 are white, they are a fairly new hybrid breed called Amberlinks.

They are white chickens, but lay brown eggs, which is a bit unusual. They were supposed to be 19 weeks old, but we think they are younger as over 3 weeks later, still no eggs! And still the customers wait!!

We loved the Amberlinks, they are a pretty chicken, as well as being good egg layers (at least they will when they start laying!) We are not used to seeing white hybrids, they are more usually brown.

With growing your own veg becoming more and more popular again, and a lot more people taking on allotments, especially younger people, quite a few people locally to us have been asking us where they can get chickens that look good as well as laying lots of eggs.

The ideal bird for this purpose we have found is the hybrid. They are bred specially for egg laying, its what you find in the commercial flocks, but just the brown chicken gets a bit boring, people want something a bit different, which is what we found in the Amberlinks, and this kindled an interest for us again. Also, buying pure breed chickens can be a very expensive business, so hybrids are the ideal 'starter' chicken for people who may never have kept chickens before.

The Arrival of the 300!

I contacted the hatchery on Friday 7th September 2007 to order our first 125 day old chicks.

Hubby had converted my garden shed into a brooder house. We used our last little bit of savings to buy 2 brooder lamps, 4 bulbs, 4 chick trough feeders and 4 chick drinkers. The lady at the hatchery said that they would put us on the 'surplus list' as they usually deal in thousands of chicks, not 125! So we would have to wait until one day the following week until all the orders had gone out to see what was left and if there was enough, we could have our 125 baby chicks. I thought we could have 50 white, 50 brown and 25 black chicks to give people a choice, but this hatchery don't any any of the black chickens, so it would be half of each colour. These we would rear until point of lay at 18 weeks then sold to likeminded people.

We would keep some ourselves, to make up our new laying flock.

There seems to be a shortage of people willing to supply small number of chickens for backyard flocks in the Lincolnshire area, at least they are hard to find!

You know what they say about the best laid plans……… Lunchtime, had a call from the hatchery to say that they had been let down by a buyer from Scotland who had ordered 500, and we could have our chicks today, and what wasn't sold would be gassed as they can't keep them over the weekend.

First of all they tried to get us to take all 500, but as the shed isn't big enough, we went down and collected 300 all white ones!! Of course, they are yellow at the moment, and so tiny, it's unbelievable. They come 100 at a time packed into a box about 24 inches square. The noise in the car on the way home was quite deafening!

It was a bit of a rush to get the finishing touches done to the shed, but it was nice and warm with a spare quilt cover over the shavings as I'd read that at first the chicks eat everything they see, so put a clean sheet or something down for a few days until they get used to what their feed looks like! That didn't take them long, they were soon running around eating everything! We bought some anti-perch chick feeders, but within hours they were 'perching' on top of the little feeders, and boy, do they eat!! They are very nervous at first, but hopefully they will soon get used to us.

The dog was fascinated with all the noise and movement, probably hoping the chicks are lunch!!!

I've never kept chicks from day old before, so was worried about them being too hot or too cold, so I kept going out to see to them every hour, but last looked at them at 10.30pm, and the temperature was up to 32C so left them in peace.

Up Bright and Early

It's now Saturday and the chicks are a whole day old! Most look pretty good, one or 2 look a bit mopey, but I don't know if its because there is something wrong, or they are just tired from the exertions of their first day out of the shell. Shall keep my eyes on them just in case!

Boy, can they eat! we started off with the 4 small feed troughs, but took 2 out and replaced them with 2 shallow trays I had. They are eating like there's no tomorrow, and also using the trays as dust baths and for scratching around in. They are remarkable little things. Just one day out of the egg, and already doing what the big chickens do!

The shed temperature is fine, but they seem to like huddling together round the edge, which usually means they are too hot, so I spent most of today raising and lowering the heat lamp trying to get it just right. It gets very hot when the sun shines in, so I may have to shade the window a bit. And the shed really isn't big enough for 300. we thought we were only going to have 125 in there! So hubby decided to convert one of my greenhouses into another brooder house so we can have half in each. He bought some hardboard and made a big circle 2ft high like he did in the shed. Then covered the south facing glass with black plastic to shield it from the sun (not sure if black is ideal, as it draws the heat). We washed and disinfected it all, but haven't put the chicks in there yet, waiting for it all to dry out.

Sad Sunday

When we went out to the chicks on Sunday morning, hubby said there are 2 dead ones in there. so I picked one up, that had been trampled on, but when I picked the other one up, she was still alive, but very poorly looking. So I took her in the house, and made her a little brooder box of her own.

I cut the lid of a photocopy paper box in half, and fitted the lampholder from hubby's bedside light into one half of it, and glass painted a small pygmy bulb red with glass paint. folded up a spare pillowcase and put the chick which I'd called mighty mouse for some stupid reason, in the box, I kept the temperature constant with the light on and putting the other half of the box lid on and off, and I'd read on the internet that you can feed small chicks with some warm water with a little molasses dissolved in it. I didn't have any molasses, so I dissolved a little dark brown sugar in some warm water and fed it to the chick with a clean dropper that I had. I kept this up all day, in between looking after the other chicks and chickens we have.

Sadly, all my efforts were wasted as she died about 7.30 that night. I know its silly, but I was really upset as I really wanted her to live. Hubby said the reason the hatchery give you 2% extra is because they expect some to die, but it doesn't make you feel any better does it?

Wings and Tails!

By Monday, they had started to grow their first little white wing feathers and tiny white tails started to appear! It may sound corny, but it was amazing to see my big burly hubby standing in the doorway of the shed enthralled with 300 tiny white and yellow chicks racing around. If they want to get to the other end of the shed, it doesn't matter that there are another 299 chicks in the way, they just wave their wings and race over the top of them!

Last Friday, each chick weighed in at 40gms, by Monday, the ones that I weighed were between 48 and 55 gms, then I weighed a few again on Wedneday and most were over 70gms! They are supposed to weigh between 60 and 68 gms by the time they are a week old.