Hello everyone I'm countrymom9 residing in beautiful southwest Minnesota with my husband our 9 children, rottweiler, mini lop - Clover, and now 4 gold star hens! We are accidental country folk but loving it! Adding chickens to our family had been quite an experience. We started with 6 welsummers from TSC. (Posted about a month ago). Come to find out our what we thought were hens were 5 roosters and one hen. Considering we live in city limits our sun greeting roos had to go. So off to the crockpot the 5 went. We then found some gold stars from a farm in town to hopefully be friends with our lonely hen. However, with her being a little longer and smaller in size the transition period of merging the 4 new hens with our little hen didn't go well. They started to draw serious amounts of blood. So in best interest of her we found a more experienced farm that could help her get better and have a home on their large farm. So we now have the 4 gold star hens that are laying 3-4 eggs a day! Our kids love giving them cabbage and fruit scraps as treats! They also love going out and looking for eggs every morning! Crazy start to our chicken adventure but definitely glad to have found this site!
Welcome to BYC! Please make yourself at home and are here to help. Sorry about all your roos! Good luck with your flock and welcome to ours!
Hello and Welcome To BYC! Sorry the Welsummers didn't work out, glad the Gold Stars are doing well and laying lots of eggs for you!
Welcome to BYC! Glad you decided to join our flock. Gold Stars are one of many labels under which some hatcheries market their Red Sex Links, but no matter what label they are marketed under, Red Sex Links are egg laying machines (as you have discovered). I'm sorry that you had to give up your roosters, but in the big picture there are some real benefits to not having roosters. Roosters can be very hard on hens physically; over-breeding them, injuring them with their beaks and spurs, and battering them. I currently have 25 hens, no roosters, and I get loads of eggs without feeding any non-egg laying mouths, without the aggression, fights, crowing in the middle of the night, injuries, and over-bred and battered hens that frequently goes along with having roosters (especially too many). Please feel free to ask any questions you may have. We are here to help in any way we can. Good luck with your flock.