The girls have developed lots of sounds: contented singing, rambunctious cackling, and indignant complaining, to name a few.
When your chicks reach their third month of life, you should begin planning for laying. You have about two months before those first pullet marbles start appearing, but soon enough the term “nest egg” won’t just refer to your 401(k) plan. So it’s time to start building and installing nesting boxes for your growing birds.
From Chicks Chickens
Each of your hens will produce—get this—45 pounds of poop a year. That is a lot of free fertilizer, and if you play your cards right it can be the manna from heaven your tomatoes have been begging for.
Turning your birds’ coop waste into compost is a great side benefit of keeping chickens. You just need to be careful in how you use it. Since chicken manure is considered “hot,” meaning very potent in nitrogen, it needs to be used sparingly in its fresh form or composted down over the course of a year before it can be turned over in your garden as a humus booster.
I use the deep-bed method for my coop. This means instead of cleaning out the old bedding and replacing it every time I freshen the coop, I pour fresh straw or pine shavings on top of the old stuff instead. This creates the necessary alchemy for the waste below to heat and compost underneath the feet of my birds. And when I clean out that coop in the spring, I have a power house of nutrients for my garden.
Since most people line their coops with a bedding of wood shavings or straw, you already have the carbon ingredient ready to go, and by adding your birds’ old waste and bedding into your compost turner or onto your compost pile, you are not only recycling, you’re creating topsoil that will make the onions for your omelets sing for joy.
We keep our birds confined to their coop unless we are out in the yard with them, since a lot of our neighbors let their dogs run free. A drawback to confinement in a smaller space is that the more they grow, the more they devastate the lawn beneath them by eating as much green as they can and scratching away what they can’t. We minimize their impact by moving our portable coop every day to a fresh patch of forage.
Chicken manure becomes a valuable fertilizer once it’s composted. If you have more than you can use, gardeners will happily take it off your hands.
And then one day it happens. . . . You go out to the coop on a brisk September morning—feed scoop in hand and fresh water sloshing in a bucket—thinking it’s going to be like every other morning with the girls, who are cooing and clamoring for breakfast. But then something makes you tilt your head and stop in your tracks. You can just tell something has happened. Something feels new and exciting. As the hens all rush to chow down on their morning meal, you walk over to the nearest nest box and . . . yes! There it is, as beautiful as you imagined it would be! The first egg has finally arrived! Congratulations!
Your big girls are ready for layer rations now, and it’s time to switch to a new feed.
After all your patient waiting, your girls have finally rewarded you for all that good care. However, those first eggs may not be what you had in mind. Sometimes they’ll be so tiny, they’ll look like robins’ eggs. And some may not even have a yolk. Occasionally you’ll get an egg laid without a shell—just a kind of white membrane holding a small yolk. Those first eggs may have specks or streaks of blood on them, too.
All of this is normal. An eighteen- to twenty-week-old pullet needs to mature into her new occupation. Hens need to work up to those jumbo eggs you’re used to seeing in the store. I promise you, though, even that first little pullet egg will be worlds apart from any store-bought variety.
Honey’s eggs are consistently round and fat in appearance—more of an oval than an egg shape.
Tilda’s eggs usually have an uneven shell color, with little white speckles all over.
Amelia’s eggs are impeccably perfect in shape and shell, but you’re not likely to find eggs this color at your local market.
Chick Diary
In the industrial model of farming, uniformity of product is a key goal, so the eggs in a supermarket carton are identical in color, size, and shape. None of our chickens would pass muster as an industrial layer, but we treasure their uniqueness. It’s satisfying to be able to identify which eggs belong to whom.
Even once hens are mature, you can still occasionally get an odd egg. This one from Amelia, with its mottled color and calcium deposits, looks as if it has the plague. Hens have bad days like everyone else and usually snap back to normal right away.
If you have done the work of raising a healthy, slick flock of chickens, you might want to strut your stuff—and theirs—at a local county fair or poultry show. The American Poultry Association, 4-H, and many local poultry clubs hold events where bird lovers can enter, chat, and talk chickens all day long. It’s a chance to swell with pride when the animal you raised from a day-old chick comes home with a blue ribbon. I mean, you worked hard to bring up that spunky little hen into the beautiful Buff Orpington she is today, as gold as Jason’s fleece and as bright eyed as a day-old calf. Being able to show her off and maybe win something is a lot of fun. And hey, a little recognition is nice, isn’t it?
I entered my farm-raised Silkie bantams in the Bonner County Fair in Idaho, and my hen and cockerel pair took second place in their division. We didn’t come home with any trophy, but the prize did cover their entry fees, and the time spent in the poultry exhibition area turned out to be a hotbed of conversation, laughs, bartering, and education. I learned so much by just chatting with other hobbyists as I fed and watered the entrants and walked around the fair looking at other chickens. It was an experience I hope to have again.
If fairs aren’t your scene, you can find other ways to get active in poultry outside your own coop. Your kids can get involved in 4-H, and you can join your local breed or poultry club. The clubs usually revolve around showing, but they’re also a wellspring of information and experience.
Chick Diary
When we hold a treat like clover over our girls’ heads, they’ll leap into the air to grab it. All of us, including the chickens, find this endlessly amusing.
In a cardboard box tucked under my right arm, a pair of Black Silkie bantams were about to make their county fair debut. It was my first fair, as well. After being instructed in how to fill out the forms and hang the cage tags, plus the care and feeding responsibilities of the exhibitors, I was ready to show my birds. Those little black chicks I had nurtured from infancy strutted and crowed for the whole county to see. I was genuinely proud of them; they were bright eyed and seemed happy.
The night before I had washed them in natural dish detergent and gently blow-dried them on towels while we listened to the back porch bluegrass show on NPR. The notion that a few years ago my New York City design school friends and I were skipping through galleries in Chelsea and eating overpriced French toast at the Empire Diner made me laugh out loud while I dried my pathetic wet hen’s face with a towel. Unlike many of those old college friends, I had yet to travel overseas, but I still felt I had made one heck of a journey.
The fair lasted a whole week. I didn’t know the first thing about conformation of Silkie bantams, but I ended up winning a few ribbons. I also ended up with the grand champion rooster. These kinds of things just happen with poultry people. A couple of us were in the poultry barn, squawking louder than the hens about our birds, and soon we had a trade going on. She would take home my Black Silkie rooster, and I would take her regal Welsummer.
Within minutes of bringing him home, he conquered one of my hens. If nothing else, I made one impressive chicken yenta.
Chickens lay eggs when their instincts tell them that their babies have a good chance of survival, which is in the spring and summer. If you want to keep egg production up, even in midwinter, hens need to be fooled into thinking it’s still reproduction season. This requires artificial lighting. For peak laying productivity, augmentation should start when daylight falls below 15 hours per day, usually in September. Your artificial lighting program needs to be maintained until the following spring, when you can let nature take over again. If you forget to turn the lights on for even one day, your hens may go into a molt and stop laying.
If you’re not always home on time to flip the switch, set up a timer on your coop’s light. Mine automatically flips on at 4 () in the winter, so even if I’m late at the office, I pull into the driveway to see the henhouse light already on. If you have a timer, you also won’t forget to turn the lights of. Your flock needs a good night’s rest, and the girls won’t sleep as well under glaring lights.
You can use either incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. Fluorescent bulbs are less expensive to run and, since they use less power, are more eco-friendly, but be sure that you get the ones labeled “soft white.” Counterintuitively, fluorescent bulbs labeled “daylight,” imitating the appearance of sunlight, have a cooler color temperature and will not stimulate a chicken’s reproductive system.
If an electrical socket is not an option in your coop, you can set up a relatively inexpensive solar electric system like the ones commonly available for RVs. Look for a solar-charged battery powering a 12-volt light.
The disadvantage of a lightweight, portable coop is that it doesn’t offer enough protection against the very cold winters we have in the Northeast. During the coldest months, we keep our coop in the garage, which shelters the chicken run and keeps the girls warm. I lay down a heavy-duty tarp to protect the garage floor and add a deep layer of straw to absorb the manure. I muck out the coop once a week and put in fresh litter. The old, soaked straw makes premium compost.
Greedy for greens now that there is a lack of forage
To keep your hens laying eggs through the winter, supplement daylight with artificial light.
Heavy snow destroyed the roof of the coop. Due to the collapse of their home, the two remaining Silkies have moved inside. They spend most of their time in the garage, but I let them hang around the kitchen for about an hour every night. They drink out of the dog bowl and roost on the small metal planter of dirt that used to hold lettuce heads but now just has a coating of chicken feed on it. Which means they have soft earth to scratch in even though it’s 15 degrees outside.
Last night the quiet, calm pair sat on the top of the couch to watch TV with me. Every so often they would coo or cock their head but then pretty much just fell asleep. It’s kind of nice having them inside. I never had a parrot, but birds make darn good company. They’ll sit on your lap and eat out of your hand.
They like to be petted and chase each other like cats or dogs would. They have never had an “accident” indoors. I don’t know why some people are convinced that all animals want to do when they get indoors is defecate on a carpet—as if they themselves run to the bathroom every time they visit someone’s home.
Anyway, the chickens aren’t house pets. They’ll be back outside for good when the thaw hits and they have a new home. But right now it’s kinda fun to walk into the kitchen and see a tiny black chicken perched on the microwave preening its feathers.
