farm chicken

Oh, to have the life of a free range farm chicken! Although, our flock may soon roam inside of large run after almost a year free range. I’ll explain why soon. 🙂

The beginnings of our life with chickens:

When we say we own a “farm”, people usually ask: “what kind of animals do you have?” “do you have chickens?” Evan decided early on he did not want to “deal with chickens.” He did; however, agree to guinea fowl. (Click here for two blog posts regarding guineas.) A friend overheard our conversations, and said he could bring us a few guinea keets. He arrived to our house with a cat carrier full of birds.

We were now the proud owners of 12 guinea keets and 9 chicks, sex unknown.

Our friends graciously built us this wonderful house for the babies to live in.

Baby birds grow quickly, and we needed to plan for a bigger house soon.

Baby Clem

Building a chicken coop:

Evan researched chicken coop designs and created an A-Frame design for our birds. We built the house on a Saturday and had it move in ready on Sunday.

laying out coop design

framing the coop

adding the siding

front door in place

moving the coop outside

Free Range Life:

Once we completed the coop, the chickens moved outside! We kept them closed into the coop until they were bigger and grew their adult feathers. At that point, we let them out for supervised yard visits until Evan said they were big enough to fend for themselves.

chicks moving outside

Exploring the Yard

Young Red

Young Clem

And then they Grew up!

Its amazing how quickly the chickens transformed from little chicks into their adult selves. It was fun to watch the colors of their adult feathers grow in and change from their baby fluff. We fed the baby chicks starter/grower and advanced the feed according to the directions. Guineas required the highest amount of protein percentage sold at the feed store. At this stage, the chickens lived harmoniously and enjoyed pecking for bugs and exploring the bushes.

Ninja

Clem growing up

Red Growing Up

Establishing the Pecking Order

As the chickens grew, we noticed many grew large combs. Unfortunately, most of our gifted chickens were roosters, and a group full of roosters is not a happy group. The guineas also became more aggressive and chased the chickens around the yard pulling out their tail feathers. Evan and I decided to gift back most of the roosters and guineas to their original owner.

Guineas

Clem leading the group

Our Current Group

Evan and I kept Clem and Red, although in hindsight, two roosters is one too many. Soon after, we lost the two hens we kept to injury/predators. We also kept two of the guineas that were ostracized from the original group. We couldn’t leave the boys without girlfriends, so this March, we bought four fat hens from the flea market.

Wet Fat Hen

eggs from our hens

Life of a Chicken:

The chickens thoroughly enjoy running all around the yard. They come up to us when we come home and try and eat all of Copper’s food.

Clem and Red think they like coffee

Red thinks he can come in the house

Reading with Mom

Clem in the sunset

Hanging with Copper

Guinea

Chickens in the Snow

Snow in the south!

What we’ve learned:

Chickens have no boundaries. They try and roost anywhere they can, poop wherever they are standing, and have zero regard for your things. Our chickens love hanging out in the barn leaving presents on every surface. They also love the dog’s water better than theirs. Two roosters really is one too many. Clem and Red chase each other around the farm, and are very territorial when it comes to the ladies. Clem turned into the meaner of the two roosters, and he thinks I should be chased whenever he sees me. Because of this, we want to make a large run for them in one of our treed areas. They will still have plenty of room to run and roam, but will no longer have access to our barn for roosting!

Red thanks you for checking out our latest farm update! You’ll be seeing plenty of him in the future.

SaveSave