The Chicks Have Arrived!

Our chicks arrived a couple days earlier than expected and all 30 are doing well! The kids were very excited when I got a call from the Post Office last Wednesday and came home to surprise them with the Rudd Rangers. They came a day early and with such surprise I didn’t have the brooder set up yet. I found an old tote in the shed and made a make shift brooder for them. The second surprise came early Friday morning when I got another call from the Post Office that we had some more chicks ready for pick up! Due to my work schedule I hadn’t had a chance to build a brooder yet and with all 30 chicks here and just the small makeshift brooder, I had to make an hour trek north to my father in laws house to grab the brooder I gave to him a couple years ago. Once we got it home and unloaded, we got the chicks settled in and they were pretty happy with all the extra room.

With having these chicks for 7 days and 5 days respectively, it’s amazing how much faster the Rudd Rangers are growing than the Chocolate and Lavender Orpington’s. The Rudd Rangers are already twice the size of the others.

The Rudd Rangers on the car ride home from the Post Office!

The big brooder with all 30 chicks!

Its amazing the see the older 3 kiddos step up and make sure the chicks always have fresh food and water. Every chance they get with their breaks from home school, they come out to look at the chicks.

Starting Fresh!

For the past couple of years we have had California Greys for strictly eggs. This years chickens have severely underperformed in terms of giving us eggs. We currently have 13 hens that are 7 months old and we MAY get one egg a day, while last year with our 9 hens we had enough to provide all the eggs we needed for our selves as well as sell them locally to help cover feed cost.

We did a lot of research and we decided to try something different and order some chicks from Hoover’s Hatchery. With the rising prices for chicken we chose to go with dual purpose chickens as well as some Rudd Rangers. For the dual purpose, we chose the Lavender Orpington’s and Chocolate Orpington’s. According to Hoover’s website, the Lavender Orpington’s will weigh around 7-8 lbs when fully grown and the Chocolate Orpington’s will weigh between 8-9 lbs when fully grown. As far as the Rudd Rangers, we will be doing a quick run to get some meat in the freezer. These are supposed to be in the 8-11 lb range within 12-14 weeks.

We will be updating with some pictures in the next few days when the chicks arrive.

The Decision To Start Our Homestead

When we first bought our house in May 2016 on an 1/8th of an acre, we had plans to keep the back yard simple. We had a small pool for the kids and had a few pots with some tomatoes in there. All was fine and dandy before the pool tore and we were unable to fix it. Instead of buying another pool we decided we wanted to start growing some vegetables. We headed to Home Depot and got some lumber. We built a 4′ x 8′ raised bed as well as two 2′ x 8′ raised beds. We planted summer squash in the 4′ x 8′ bed and tomatoes in both of the smaller beds. We were able to get quite a few squash before the squash bugs got to the plants and ended our squash season a little early. The tomatoes produced a large amount and we were able to eat tomatoes almost every day picked from the garden. We were then hooked. After my father in law started raising rabbits we then decided to do the same. He graciously gave us a buck and two does to start out with so we could breed them and grow them out. Around 28 days after we bred the rabbits we had our first litter! It was very exciting and the kids absolutely loved the baby rabbits. We enjoyed the thought of having fresh vegetables from our garden and fresh meat that we got from raising the rabbits. We then decided that this was something that was important to us and decided to start our little homestead.

This was our pool that the kids enjoyed so much.

This was from the kids helping me plant our lettuce in November of last year.