lyleg5895
Chirping
Hi, I'm Lyle of Bear-Tree Homestead. I'm an artist, veteran, woodworker, full-time dad, part-time strongman, and I spend half my week working nights in a tire factory and the other half playing mad scientist/tinkerer. My wife and I have been homesteading with our little ones (4, 10, 12, w/ one on the way) for the last three years and raising chickens for just as long. We started with a hen and a rooster (both white leghorns) that my daughter hatched in a school project. Sadly, those two are longer with us but since then our flock as expanded dramatically. We currently have ten mature laying hens (Rhode Island Reds, Black Australorp, White Leghorn, Blue Cochin, Gold-laced Wyandotte, Easter Egger, and Red Sex-link), three roosters (Barred Cochin, Gold-laced Wyandotte, Partridge Cochin), four meat birds (Delawares, Jersey Giants), and two adorable mixed chicks that hatched a couple weeks ago along with another clutch of eggs that our Blue Cochin is sitting on (due to hatch any day now). And, because my timing is terrible (or awesome?), right before two of our hens went broody I ordered an assortment of twenty pullets that should also arrive any day now. I'm often asked what I do with all the eggs we get, to which I reply, "We eat them!" We eat a lot of eggs in our house and even while getting almost a dozen per day, we still have to buy eggs sometimes if my wife wants to do any baking. Hence the twenty new chicks. I absolutely love raising chickens and we eventually want to expand to quail and possibly ducks and turkeys. We free-range and have a big coop in the barn with doggy door in the back where the chooks spill out into the yard each morning. We also tractor some of our birds in the spring and early fall to help prep the gardens for planting. My wife likes to refer to the chickens as my feathered children and she's probably not wrong.
