Arizona Chickens

[ArizonaNessa]

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50 red sex link and 50 gold sex link. Everyone is doing really great. Getting ready to order 100 more in the next few days. Just have not quite made a final decision on what two breeds yet though. The silver laced wyandottes and ameraucanas (EE) are getting ready to hit the ground running in a week or so.

 

[ChrystalGail]

Enjaytoo - Yeah, we just bought 2.5 acres down here with 2 houses on it for a price that we could not pass up! My hubby is a Police Officer down here (not in Casa Grande, but close), so his commute is now only about 15 minutes. We love it! We are near the rodeo park on Pinal and Rodeo. It's our own little island in the middle of the city! Plenty of room to stretch our legs!!!

Nessa - WOW!

That's alot of birds! Wait a minute... What am I saying? I have 227 quail eggs in my incubator right now!!!!! Yikes!

THAT'S alot of birds (or at least I hope it will be!). Do you order big batches and sell off the ones you don't want/need? I've thought of doing that, but I'm too addicted to hatching! LOL...

 

[ArizonaNessa]

No it's really not that many birds in the grand scheme of things. I actually only have 7 pet birds. I order in lots of a hundred or more at a time and raise and sell them. Very rarely do I choose one to keep. There is a really long story as to how I fell in love with chickens but basically the hobby of raising and selling them started a little less than ten years ago. I try to have a variety of ages and breeds to choose from. I am really excited about this coming spring because I am going to raise some of the less common breeds in addition to the regular more commonly available ones. You know the funny thing is I have been doing this for years and it was only recently that I learned from my mother that raising poultry is what my maternal grandmother used to do to provide for her family. I just know that she is up there somewhere looking down and smiling.

Good Luck to you on your little quail babies!

 

[ArizonaDesertChicks]

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Sounds like a nice way to earn some extra money.

My girls are going to do this in a couple weeks (chicks are due on the 28th). They (and others) were given $10 each by our church and were told to try and invest the $10 for a women's charity in India. My 2 girls ordered 25 EE chicks from MPC and are going to raise & sell about a third of them ($20 worth) after 6 weeks (money's due back Nov. 8th) and then they'll finishing raising the rest of the chicks for some extra spending money for themselves.

You must have a lot of space to keep 100 chicks - 25 is a lot to us - especially once they start growing. Do you have a large yard or a lot of room? We have almost 1/2 acre and keep our chickens in chainlink dog runs.

My 11 laying pullets have a 7 1/2 ft x 18 ft. area (open coop & run), while the 7 younger pullets currently have a 6 x 10 area (we plan to sell a few and go down to 14-15 hens once the younger ones get to laying age). The two runs connect to each other, so once the 2 flocks get integrated, they'll share the coop & both runs. I have a separate 6 x 6 run for the new chicks - should be big enough - we'll be selling them off as they grow and need more space.

I hope our new chicks don't come in any new & unique EE colors - that would make us want to keep a couple of them.

So far, even though we bought them at 2 different times, all our easter eggers (7 of them) have only had two types of coloring - either mostly red with lacing or brown with gold necks (like a welsummer). They all have names and we can tell them apart by their combs, body size, or beard color/type.

 

[ArizonaNessa]

Actually my property is not all that big. I think it is 1/3 of an acre. My pets have full run of the yard but all the other birds are in huge aviary coop/runs. There are 4 buildings~ one is the shop/storage, one is my brooder building with 6 brooders that hubby built they are 4 X 2 1/2 (i'm guessing) with built in lights and seasonal lids, one building is an aviary that is about 24 X 8(again guessing) and the other aviary/coop building I have no idea how big it is but it runs from one side of the property to the other with doors and dividers. I have a paver sidewalk that runs down through the middle of it all covered with a green screen frame and mister system. The birds don't really stay that long because I sell them so it's not like I have hundreds of full grown layers to find a place for. I have tried to take pics of the big building but I would have to take the picture in like 4 shots which would never make any sense to anyone that has never seen it. Oh and by the way, it was all pretty much free. Yep everything here is recycled things or homemade. All those buildings I just mentioned are all made out of garage doors that we took apart and put back together the way we wanted them. We make our own feeders, waterers, brooders, and nest boxes. All the pine shavings comes from a friend that does work for the state up north thinning the skinny pines. So the only thing we really have in the buildings is wire and screws.

 

[LarryPQ]

Nessa, you should talk my hubby into letting me get more birds... It sounds like you have an efficent setup. We'll have to drop by next time I go see my dad--then you can give my hubby the old 1-2

 

[ArizonaDesertChicks]

Nessa -- Sounds perfect! Free is even better!

Our coop was almost all recycled materials we already had (including the roof we stole from behind one of our buildings (the previous owner had built), but we did end up buying the dog runs from craigslist (good deals though).

 

[ArizonaNessa]

I just think that the world has turn into a "disposable world" If something breaks everyone just runs out and buys something new. WHY??? I say fix what you can, build what you can, and reuse what you can even if that means turning that something into something completely different than what it originally was. Yes it takes a little work and brain power but it gives you such a good feeling in the end knowing that YOU DID IT!!! I'm not saying it is a bad thing if you don't know how to use a chop saw or a cordless drill but why not try to learn or something? Every single day I wake up and say to myself, "I am going to learn something new today!" One day I got brave and shocked the crud out of my hubby when I walked out to the shop and said teach me how to use that thingy. The look on his face was priceless but he taught me and frankly between whoever is reading this and the fence post I use that chop saw thingy for more than lumber. It cuts up raw hide bones quite well

Now hubby comes looking for me everytime he has something go missing from the shop

Hubby is resistant but I am going to make him teach me how to use that welder machine out there too eventually. Man, can you just imagine what I could make a mess of if I knew how to use that thing

 

[LarryPQ]

I went down to the Habitat for Humanity Restore today and bought an entire kitchen island for $10. It is basically 2 base cabinets back-to-back. So 60" by 48"? Also bought 6 large melamine shelving peices (to separate each cabinet into its own nesting box and make a "top") and a hollow-core outside door (for the slanted/hinged top of the box, it will be storage). Those cost $8 and $10, respectively.

I also got a smalller above-the-fridge cabinet complete, for $10. Hopefully they will be the nesting boxes for the bantys. That one was an inpulse buy.

This morning we screwed the doors shut and then popped out their middles. Tomorrow we'll cut the island in half, screw the two peices side-by-side, and install the inside seperators. The H4HRestore didn't have any good paints today

so if I feel adventurous-- I may take the 3-year-old down to HD for some "oops" paint and have him waggle his eyebrows at the lady. He always seems to get them to change the oops color....

The swinging slanted top might be a day or two, but you never know what the DH feels like accomplishing---

All in all $40 for a GYNOURMOUS nesting box and storage area. A little more than I intended to spend, but once we started getting creative it was all downhill.

 

[ChrystalGail]

I am right there with you guys/gals!!! My coop is 2 $20 huge shipping crates that I connected and added doors where I wanted and the nesting box. It is about 7.5' long x 5' wide x 4.5' tall. I love it and it works great for the birds! The nexting boxes I made out of left over wood from the kids bunkbed bunkie boards (the wood under the mattresses). The only things I bought new were the hinges and locks. I think I spent about $55 (maybe a little less) for that huge coop! I couldn't have bought the wood to make it for that!

I'm super excited, because I found a place in Tucson that has free wood shipping crates that I'm going to be collecting to make more coops for the new babies!

Great job everyone on the reducing, recycling and reusing! "Can we fix it? Yes we can!" Sorry, my kids love Bob the Builder!

Have a great weekend everyone!!!