The chicks

  When we heard that our country was going to start allowing chicken to be sent to China for processing then shipped back here, we decided to grow some of our own for the freezer. We talked about the Cornish Cross chickens, but decided to just go with regular chickens. So I drug my incubator out and set it up. I have not used it for over 10 years, so didn't have high hopes of a good hatch. I also over crowded the eggs and the power was off for 2.5 hours about half way through the hatch.

   Even against all those odds, I still had 36 out of 50 eggs hatch. That is a 75% hatch and considered very good! This was the first bunch to hatch out.

   As soon as they were completely dry and fluffy, I took them down to the brooder house. These are from my chicks that hatched out last summer. Something got into my older flock and killed all by 2. So I decided to order more layers. I made the order out back in January before we even thought of hatching some of our own chickens out. So I had 27 chicks show up from www.cacklehatchery.com about the same time that these were hatching out.

   These are 5 Australorp pullets, 5 Rhode Island Red pullets, 5 straight run Barred Rocks, 5 sr New Hampshires, and 5 sr Welsummers. They also sent me 2 extra chicks, but I don't remember which breed had extra. I took them down and added them to the brooder with the chicks I had hatched. No problems and as of now, I have not lost any of them.

   They are now about 2.5 weeks old and almost feathered out. I plan to move them into the other side of the shed the ducks are in next week as we have more eggs due to hatch out. I know it will take about 3 months to grow these breeds out, but I think it will be worth it. I hope to have a 100 to put in the freezer. Now I just need to decide what breed rooster to keep, barred rock, new hampshire, or welsummer. I might just keep one of each and see how they do. I won't tolerate a mean rooster.

This was taken about a week ago. They have grown a lot since then. Well, I am off to try to kill some weeds. We have had several inches of rain in the past week and expecting more tomorrow, so I need to try to get ahead of the weeds. You all have a great day.