Slothinc
Songster
- Apr 15, 2020
- 209
- 477
- 176
I have been inspired by others on here like @Debbie292d to make a single post talking about my chicken adventures! I’ll warn you this first post is long, but more just for my own records, and I’ll keep track of my hatches and birds here for journaling purposes!
My story started a few years ago when I built a coop from scratch, while simultaneously incubating shipped silkie eggs and a few locals. But then we had to relocate and I left my coop and chooks with some friends. They took great care of them and I came back to some of my original chickens (and a few that had hatched after I left.) We lived a few hours away from where we were originally so enlisting the help of a CRANE, we extracted my homemade coop and run and relocated it to our new place!
So here I find myself a chicken mama once more and I couldn’t be more thrilled! Silkies hold my heart, I love almost everything about them. They’re small size, fluffy feathers, crests, beards, fluffy feet, shape, style, colors, black skin, waddling, and sweet nature… I love everything about them! Seriously it’s like the breed was created for me!!
My favorite colors are paint and lavender but I have never been able to get my hands on lavender. I currently have 6 hens. Three paint silkies, two black silkies with leakage, and one black copper marans who I’m not especially fond of lol!
My dream is to work on a line of colored-egg laying silkies, breeding towards silkie SOP. I can’t really have roos where I live but I’m going to see what I can do haha. I think it will be a very slow process.
I got myself an incubator and have started hatching already!
The first batch hatched on Leap Day (2/29). They are from a breeder in Iowa who ships eggs more securely and carefully than anyone else I have ever seen, and her pricing is very reasonable. Her name is Brenda Smith and she is on FB. I had a couple of shipped batches from her a few years ago and one of my remaining paint hens was hatched from her eggs! I have 9 black and/or black mottled silkie babies from her eggs. I haven’t ever had a mottled silkie before (not a fan of the light beaks and wattles and combs on mottled and cuckoo) but it seems like breeders are getting more of the black pigment now. These babies are all pretty dark! So I can’t wait to see how they turn out. I put them in my outside brooder yesterday (1.5 weeks old) with a heat pad cave and they are doing really well!
The next batches of eggs are in the incubator now and they are a batch of show silkies from Bobbi Porto (I have always wanted her eggs!!) she is so so sweet and amazing. Out of 19 eggs, only 6 are developing. They really got jostled in the mail! But I am really crossing my fingers that some may hatch - there are 5 blue cream (very excited about this color) and one lemon cuckoo.
The other batch in the incubator are 4 eggs from someone on this forum kind enough to send me some of their silkied EE eggs - beautiful blue silkie sized eggs, and they already have a lot of the silkie traits! They will be white. I am excited to get some blue egg layers from them!
Okay then I did a bad thing, and ordered more eggs to fill all the empty places in my incubator… so now I get the joy of doing a staggered hatch in my one incubator. I think these eggs will be my last hatches for awhile!
The first batch is 7 eggs from Akers farms, she has two frizzled satin silkie hens who lay a blue egg and she was kind enough to send me eggs only from them. One egg looks very small, so I don’t think it will fare well, and the others are kind of on the big size (larger than my silkies eggs) but I’m super excited to see what they look like!
And last but certainly not least, I ordered my dream eggs, for which I have zero expectations for, as they are lavender eggs and lavender silkies have a very very hard time hatching (and living in general haha) so we will see, but I’m not trying to keep my hopes up. They are from Geri Godina who comes very highly recommended. They arrive tomorrow. I believe she sent 7-8 eggs. So excited to try! (A few years ago I got lavender hatching eggs but they were mangled in the mail and not one ever even started to develop. Hoping for a better outcome this time!)
Anyways, that was basically a novel of an introduction!! Sorry about it and be ready for all my chicken adventures to be posted here.
My story started a few years ago when I built a coop from scratch, while simultaneously incubating shipped silkie eggs and a few locals. But then we had to relocate and I left my coop and chooks with some friends. They took great care of them and I came back to some of my original chickens (and a few that had hatched after I left.) We lived a few hours away from where we were originally so enlisting the help of a CRANE, we extracted my homemade coop and run and relocated it to our new place!
So here I find myself a chicken mama once more and I couldn’t be more thrilled! Silkies hold my heart, I love almost everything about them. They’re small size, fluffy feathers, crests, beards, fluffy feet, shape, style, colors, black skin, waddling, and sweet nature… I love everything about them! Seriously it’s like the breed was created for me!!
My favorite colors are paint and lavender but I have never been able to get my hands on lavender. I currently have 6 hens. Three paint silkies, two black silkies with leakage, and one black copper marans who I’m not especially fond of lol!
My dream is to work on a line of colored-egg laying silkies, breeding towards silkie SOP. I can’t really have roos where I live but I’m going to see what I can do haha. I think it will be a very slow process.
I got myself an incubator and have started hatching already!
The first batch hatched on Leap Day (2/29). They are from a breeder in Iowa who ships eggs more securely and carefully than anyone else I have ever seen, and her pricing is very reasonable. Her name is Brenda Smith and she is on FB. I had a couple of shipped batches from her a few years ago and one of my remaining paint hens was hatched from her eggs! I have 9 black and/or black mottled silkie babies from her eggs. I haven’t ever had a mottled silkie before (not a fan of the light beaks and wattles and combs on mottled and cuckoo) but it seems like breeders are getting more of the black pigment now. These babies are all pretty dark! So I can’t wait to see how they turn out. I put them in my outside brooder yesterday (1.5 weeks old) with a heat pad cave and they are doing really well!
The next batches of eggs are in the incubator now and they are a batch of show silkies from Bobbi Porto (I have always wanted her eggs!!) she is so so sweet and amazing. Out of 19 eggs, only 6 are developing. They really got jostled in the mail! But I am really crossing my fingers that some may hatch - there are 5 blue cream (very excited about this color) and one lemon cuckoo.
The other batch in the incubator are 4 eggs from someone on this forum kind enough to send me some of their silkied EE eggs - beautiful blue silkie sized eggs, and they already have a lot of the silkie traits! They will be white. I am excited to get some blue egg layers from them!
Okay then I did a bad thing, and ordered more eggs to fill all the empty places in my incubator… so now I get the joy of doing a staggered hatch in my one incubator. I think these eggs will be my last hatches for awhile!
The first batch is 7 eggs from Akers farms, she has two frizzled satin silkie hens who lay a blue egg and she was kind enough to send me eggs only from them. One egg looks very small, so I don’t think it will fare well, and the others are kind of on the big size (larger than my silkies eggs) but I’m super excited to see what they look like!
And last but certainly not least, I ordered my dream eggs, for which I have zero expectations for, as they are lavender eggs and lavender silkies have a very very hard time hatching (and living in general haha) so we will see, but I’m not trying to keep my hopes up. They are from Geri Godina who comes very highly recommended. They arrive tomorrow. I believe she sent 7-8 eggs. So excited to try! (A few years ago I got lavender hatching eggs but they were mangled in the mail and not one ever even started to develop. Hoping for a better outcome this time!)
Anyways, that was basically a novel of an introduction!! Sorry about it and be ready for all my chicken adventures to be posted here.
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Can't wait to follow your flocks adventures!
My dreams of having a lavender silkie are dashed again! (The last time I ordered lavender eggs, also super expensive) usps left them outside in a truck at the post office all day long in hot weather (and couldn’t find them when I went to the post office to ask where they were) and the eggs cooked. So it’s probably just not going to happen. They are so rare because they are for some reason much more fragile than regular colored silkies. Maybe the feather shredding characteristic in lavenders doesn’t play nicely with the already shredded silkie feathers.
ugh!
Someday, I may try again.
