Painted!

We finally finished painting the coop. The color is called "Bahamas" and it makes me happy every time I look at it. It does remind me of our trip to the Bahamas....

In other news, the chicks are growing so fast! They all have very different personalities and they all have lovely beautiful feathers growing in. They briefly went outside today for the very first time in their lives.

Out in the raised beds, we have way too much lettuce, the beans and peppers are starting nicely, and the peas are flowering like crazy. Maybe tomorrow I'll sow cucumbers. The herbs are all growing well, too. It's still early in the season and this is the most successful garden I've ever planted!

The Chicken Snowball Effect

It seemed simple at first. Take a class, bring home some chickens, build a coop, wait for eggs. But of course it had to get complicated. And time consuming. And expensive.

Tyler decided almost immediately that we should invest in a premade, predator proof coop ($$) rather than spending a lot of time and money on supplies and tools. So we had a coop delivered, I picked a flamboyant paint color, Tyler bought paint ($), and he got to work leveling a spot in the side yard for the stand. Awesome.

Then we realized that the oak tree in the middle of the yard was nearly dead and was quite rotten at the base. Since it was so close to the house and surrounded by redwood trees, we decided it needed to be cut down. By a professional ($$$). So today a crew of three guys came out, climbed a nearby redwood, rigged up some ropes, and took out the dead oak tree. It was pretty impressive watching the guy maneuver a chainsaw while dangling in midair in a climbing harness. Upsides: we now have a ton of firewood for the woodstove and the chickens will have an awesome stump to roost on and to search for bugs in.

Bad photo through the window screen - but here's the tree half cut down, and the half-painted coop to the right.

The last major thing (we hope) that has to happen is building a run around the coop. Tyler wants to do it right and make sure it's secure, so yesterday he got a truckload of fence posts and cement ($). He still has to go back and get the wire ($). And install the whole thing.

These chickens had better lay a LOT of eggs. Golden ones, please.

An update on the birds:

Our chicks are about two and a half weeks old now. They're adorably awkward, like gangly little teenagers half covered in feathers with a few sweet patches of baby fluff left. They're busy establishing a pecking order and trying to fly. They've grown so tall that Tyler had to build them a bigger brooder box. This one is plywood (instead of cardboard) and has a lid!

And they have names now! Henrietta (gray), Rose (black), Blanche (blonde), and Maude (speckled). So far Rose isn't interested in chicken politics, while Henrietta and Maude have joined forces to beat up Blanche, who likes to start fights but never seems to win.

Chickie cam

Tyler made a live chick cam, because he's awesome.

Meanwhile, I've been put in charge of picking a paint color for the coop, and I'm taking my job very seriously. The baby wants to help.

I'm leaning toward something a lot like this:

Chicken Day!

We got four baby chickens today. 

It's something we've talked about for years. We almost got some last spring but I was pregnant, our house was in escrow, and we decided not to increase our responsibilities too much, too fast.  But now we own our house, we have plenty of extra space, and the baby is 8 months old - she's a lot of work but not so much that we can't handle a flock of chickens.

So my husband went to a class on backyard chicken keeping and brought home these little fuzzballs. They're four days old, and they came from a breeder in New Mexico. They're so cute that I decided to start blogging again.

All four chicks are different varieties, which is why they all look different. The stripey, sassy-looking one is an Ameraucana. The others are a Buff Cochin, Cuckoo Maran, and Blue Andalusian. If they are all hens and they all survive, we'll have eggs that are blue-green, light brown, dark brown, and white.

They arrived at our house in this fancy lightbulb box. It's apparently safer and warmer for them to travel in tight quarters.

For now, they're living in a brooder box in the basement. It's just a cardboard box with pine shavings, a special chicken waterer, a feeder full of chick food, and a heat lamp. All of this stuff was provided at the chicken class, which is pretty cool. They'll stay inside for 4-7 weeks before moving outside to a coop (which we don't have yet).

Things to be aware of if you think you want chickens and think you might start with babies:

• It takes about 6 months before you really know if they're male or female (these chicks have been sexed and there's a guaranteed 90% accuracy rate, so with 4 chicks, there's a 2 in 3 chance that they'll all be female). We don't want any roosters, so if any of these turn out to be male, we'll have to decide whether we are willing to kill it ourselves (and eat the cute little critter we've hand raised) or give it away on Craigslist (for someone else to kill and eat). 
• It's also going to be about 6 months before we get any eggs, which is kind of a bummer but I think the anticipation will be fun.
• Pasting Up. So... baby chickens will sometimes die after getting their butts plugged up with poop. In order to prevent our new baby chicks from "pasting up" and dying, their rear ends need to be checked frequently, and if things get clogged, you have to clean their little poopy butts. Tyler is in charge of poopy butt duty since I deal with 99% of the human baby's poopy butt. But if you can't handle poopy chicken butts, you might want to get adult chickens. (I will try to never type poopy butt ever again.)

I am quite sure there will be more chicken stories in my future....