New do's for Tayler & I

10  Inches to donate!

Added some pink chalk for one happy kid!  It is washable or I would have never agreed to it!

Hanging with the chickens

Beauty posing

Tayler loves hanging out with the chickens every night .  She feeds them grass & clovers through the fence.

Blaze

Phoenix

Beauty posing again

Beauty loved the camera

Beauty in front, Sparkles in the back

Feeding the chickens some grass

Feeding the chickens some clover

Phoenix

Phoenix says goodnight!

Starting a new coop

Gary has brought home about 50 free pallets in the past week and he is going back for more!  He found an IT company in RTP that had hundreds of free pallets they were trying to get rid of because they just recently got a large shipment of new servers.  He is going to use all these pallets to construct the new coop.  He plans to make the new one more of a shed style to enclose the chickens more and keep them warmer in the winter, but they will also have an outdoor run to explore.

Smaller pallets

 

Table to work on

 Tools to take pallets apart

Pallets taken apart!

One down, 49 more to go!  More pictures to come!

Our First Egg

Last Saturday 7/20/13 we got our very first egg from the chickens!  We had the chickens for 3 weeks and Gary was getting worried because they were almost 24 weeks old and he had heard that the chickens can start to lay at 18 weeks.  He tried everything, he put golf balls in the nesters, he tried different types of bedding to see what would make them happy, he bought various types of food and special treats that he read would help get the process going and finally we get an egg.  On that day Gary & Tayler noticed that Phoenix (one of the Rhode Island Reds) seemed to be protective of the nester and was running all the other chickens off every time they got close.  We decided to hang out by the coop to watch what was going on because we thought it was quite funny.  I captured this video of Phoenix.  She sounds like she's making an announcement.  We were not sure if this was her egg song or her way of telling everyone to keep away!

This went on for about an hour and then she settled in a nester and squatted.  Gary and Tayler watched her as she squatted up and down and then an egg came out!  It was a big one too, I can understand why she made so much noise!

We then took the first egg and compared it to eggs we had in our fridge from Dollar General.

Our fresh egg, the brown egg, ended up having 2 yolks inside which explains why it was so big.  To date this first egg has been the biggest so far.  You can see that the yolk has an orange color as opposed to the store bought egg with a yellow color.  Gary immediately scrambled both of the eggs up separately and we did a taste test.  The fresh egg definitely had a better flavor to it.

YUM!

 

Now 8 days later we have collected 14 eggs!  We now have 3 hens that are laying although we are not sure which ones.  One of the hens laid a very ob-longed shaped egg, so we can only assume that this was her first one!

You can see the very funny shaped one on the bottom left.  So this is what we have so far!  Minus the 3 we have eaten of course.  Soon once all 4 hens are laying daily we will have more eggs than we know what to do with!  We already have so many people that are interested in our eggs so we will have no problem getting rid of them!

 

Original Chicken Coop

Here is the first one that Gary built.  He is just getting started on a new one with a different style.  We will call this the starter coop, haha.  I will post pictures as he builds the new one!

THEN after we had the chickens for about 2 weeks he built a run onto the coop above.

With all the rain we have had around here Gary had to add a way to cover up the main coop to keep the chickens dry.  He added tarps on the 4 sides of the main coop area and fixed it so that he can roll them up and secure them with velcro when it is sunny, and he can roll them down and attach them to the coop when it is raining.  Some days we leave the tarps down when we leave for work because it might rain and then we come home and the chickens are in the covered coop and not in the run.  With these hot days I guess they like the shady coop!