New chickens and a day at the farm…
January 18th, 2008 by Jenni
We had a fun day today. We were promised some new chickens off of freecycle, and the kids and I went to go pick them up. The farm was neat, they raise goats and they had tons of them. On the way to get the chickens we went through the baby goat barn where they keep the new ones and their mamas. While we were there one of the mamas started labor, she was huge, there had to be at least two little babies in there!
The boys got to feed the goats some bread, Guenna had been sleeping in the van so she wasn’t into it :)
And here they are, our new hens, there are seven new ones. They are the barred rock breed and will lay light brown eggs.
As you can see from the picture, lady looks a lot like our new hens but she is a cuckoo maran. I don’t think we will name these, they would be quite hard to tell apart. Well, I think we have about all the chickens we can handle at this point. Unless of course one of our banties wants to set on some eggs, I promised the boys that we would let them set if they want to this spring. :)
Well, we are hoping to have some good weather here tomorrow, it would be nice to do some cleaning up outside and try to figure out how to keep the chickens out of the garage. Have a blessed weekend!
If you are interested I did a little comparison on my Homemaking Blog of the banty eggs and store bought eggs.
OK, I’m not going crazy! When I logged on “Guenna knows her letters” was at the top, when I finished watching that, I scrolled down to flickr, and the top picture was of some barred rocks, in your chicken house! I looked at the other pictures, and thought, “Oh, they must have gone to a farm.” But the chicken house looked like yours!! “What in the world!” Well, when I went back to chrisandjenni, here was a whole new post!! You should have plenty of eggs when these start laying!! Farm Fresh!!!
Ohhh! I’m so jealous sis, Lord, forgive me! How much fun! And how fun for the kids to see all those animals and the mother goat going into labor. Did she give birth while you were there?
No but she was pushing, Aidan was so excited to see her in labor. He kept telling people that we saw a mama got that was getting ready to push her babies out. I should have taken a picture of her, her tummy was huge! :)
I just noticed that all the goats in the pictures are Nubians. Is her whole herd made up of Nubies? I think they are my favorite goat. They’re like the Jerseys of the goat world.
Mom, I don’t know how many different breeds she has, she has probably at least 50 grown goats and I didn’t look that closely :) Did you mean Guernseys or Jerseys mom? I didn’t know Jersey’s were your favorite :)
I love Guernseys, of course, I meant that they are like Jerseys in that their milk is richer than the other breeds. Guernseys produce more milk than Jerseys, and it is richer than, say, Holsteins, so you can do more with it, like make butter and ice-cream. And I like the temperment of Guernseys better than Jerseys, more even tempered and not so snooty! Although Pandora was a sweetheart, of course!!