My Introduction from Illinois!

Hello all! My name is Aaron and I am totally new to all of this! My wife had this crazy idea to have chickens and at first I laughed her off. First of all, we have no experience with chickens, secondly we have a 1 yr old that consumes all our time as it is. The more and more I read about it, the more fascinated I became. So we recently decided to just dive in! We are going to start with 6 hens (which will be plenty for our needs). We plan on going with red sex linked hens and are building a coop big enough to accommodate them. I've researched PVC watering systems and gravity feed systems and I plan on making those too. We are in northwest Illinois so I am concerned about winter months but I'm developing a plan for that as well.

I will post as we embark on this crazy journey. We feel our little one will enjoy them and my wife is beyond excited. I currently sell farm equipment so I've called in the advice of my farmer buddies. Its great to have this space to ask questions and not feel stupid. This appears to be a great community and I will remain involved throughout this learning process!

Very nice to meet you Aaron - Welcome to Backyard chickens. Chickens handle cold MUCH better than heat & humidity. They should do fine in northern Illinois. You may want to check out the Learning Center, it has answers to questions, you don't even have yet. If that makes sense. So nice when the whole family is on board.

Welcome to BYC, Aaron. Glad you decided join our flock. I've raised Red Sex Links for years and they are laying machines, consistently churning out more than 300 eggs per hen per year. You should get loads of large, brown eggs from those six girls. Raising chickens is a wonderful experience for children. My granddaughter (pictured in my avatar) loves our chickens. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have. We are here to help in any way we can. Good luck in getting your coop built and in getting your RSLs.

Hi Aaron

Glad you could join the flock! How exciting for you and your family to be starting out on your chicken adventures I too started out my chicken adventures with red sex link hens. They were called Amy and Penny and they were super egg layers. They were quite friendly too and loved to free range in the garden doing an awfull lot of weeding. I'm sure your little one will enjoy the chickens too, raising chickens with chcikdren is great fun.

Wishing you the very best of luck with getting started, you will thoroughly enjoy this new and exciting time.

Enjoy BYC and all the chicken chat

Hi Aaron, welcome to BYC!

You've come to the right place for all things chicken. If you have questions, feel free to ask. There are a lot of friendly, helpful members here and you don't need to have any worries about asking.

@drumstick diva is right on target about chickens handling cold better than heat. If you would like to 'meet' other members from IL and ask them about your climate (or anything else on a local level), you can find them here:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/37/illinois

Enjoy the adventure, you and your family are in for a lot of fun.

WOW! Thank you all for the warm welcome. I will heed all your advice and poke around on here for all my crazy questions.

Welcome to BYC! I'm glad you joined us!

welcome to BYC !!