piminuse
Songster
HEADS UP: this is a long post with lots of pics. I'm treating this more as a journal/journey than a "quick update" thing and will post the first few "chapters" over the next few days. If you like to read about boring things then by all means continue...
Chapter 1: the Long Beginning that My Husband Saw Coming, But Was Too Polite to Fight Against
There comes a time in every gal’s life when she needs to don her sexiest/sexy-ish (sweatpants are en vogue now) outfit, fix her hair up into something nice, approach her partner and say, “ya know--I’m really bored in quarantine and I’m getting chickens to help me cope.” The husband may grumble, he may say that you’ve already had chickens before and even protest! Just know that once you shove a couple of yellow floofs into his hands that all his crankiness will melt away and he’ll be right beside you digging out trenches for hardware cloth and rinsing poop off the patio.
Or at least that’s been my experience. Except I didn’t do my hair and I’m pretty sure I was wearing the same PJ pants for the __ day in a row. Quarantine had hit us hard just like it had so many other people. We’re a married couple in our early 30s with our own house on a quarter-ish acre in the bustling burbs of Portland, OR (or just outside it, anyway). We’ve got 3 dogs, a cat and a whole bunch of hobbies including gardening, video games, cooking and illustration. Typical PNW peeps. Except a month of doing all your hobbies to your heart’s content, finishing all the major home projects that we’d pushed off and spending too much time in unwashed PJs was really starting to drain us.
Everyone was getting pretty bored of quarantine...
As Easter approached I kept seeing more and more ads pop up for baby chicks CL, and my mom was awaiting the arrival of her new chicks at her ranch down south. Maybe we could do chickens again, I mused. We had chickens at our old home in another county with different chicken ordinances. Chickens had always been on the roster for the new place, but they were never a priority because we had adult things to do like Bills! House renovations! Errands! Social obligations! COVID had swiftly altered our way of living and with a newly cleared garden and a whole lot of time on our hands I figured it was the perfect time to bring on the yard birds. Husband was not so enthused. Sure, he liked the old chickens at the old place, but he was pretty hands off and we got the old girls full grown. In his mind me raising new chicks meant US raising new chicks.
After a few days of melodramatic whining and leaving tabs of chicken breeds open on his laptop he conceded and said that we could bring on a few birds, but they were solely my responsibility. I don’t have kids so this may constitute as the happiest day of my life (let’s not bring up our wedding please). The gal who sold them to me had posted on CL that she had extras due to her 4-H activities being cancelled (along with so many other things) and she needed to offload them ASAP. None of the breeds in her little tractor were what she had posted online and none of them were the ones I wanted. Goodbye dreams of silver flashes from Barred Rocks. Goodbye dreams of roly-poly Faverolles... Hello to my new little peepers: Bluebell the Andalusian and Daisy a BCM whom I bought for $5 each.
Poor Bluebell was already hitting her ugly stage at only one week old!
I spent the next hour listening to their frantic peeping on the drive home. Once I got into the garage the Husband was there waiting and gently lifted the little buggers out of the box. They fell asleep instantly in his hands. Swoon! I knew I married this man for a reason. A few days later we picked up Clover the Barnevelder from another feed store (along with a RIR and Cuckoo Marans as a B-day gift for a friend starting their own chicken journey) and a few days after that and another run to Wilco where I had to scoop up Poppy Girl, the last Buff Orpington chick in the bin. I originally wanted six birds, but after too many disappointing trips to the feed store to see empty bins and too many hatcheries being sold out I settled on a modest flock of four.
We started brooding in a little plastic tote while we rearranged the garage and searched for our old dog crate. Within a week the girls were bounding around a nicely sized playground of pine shavings, sticks and lots of poop. So much poop. I’d never raised fresh babies before, so the amount of sh*t these little nuggets could produce was kind of impressive. The dust was more so. Everything, EVERYTHING within a 3’ radius was coated in dander and dust on the daily. It was like that scene from the Lion King with Mufasa explaining the Simba about the size of their kingdom being everything the light touched except it was our entire garage covered in stinky, awful poop-soot. Husband rigged up a nice cardboard buffer for the edges to bring some semblance of cleanliness back to the garage and to help mitigate any fires from the heat lamp.
The gang's all here! L to R: Clover, Bluebell, Daisy and Poppy.
Then came the hunt for the coop. I tried to convince Husband that building a coop from scratch would be 1. Cheaper and 2. Better. He didn’t bite. We set a budget of $300 and got to hunting which was an ordeal because if we thought finding chicks during a pandemic was difficult, boy were we gonna have a hard time finding a coop! Fortunately, our local Wilco had a single pre-fab in-stock for $299 (a whole $1 savings for us) and we drove down to snag it. We were a sight to see disassembling the packaging and squeezing the panels into our little Mazda sedan. We chose a spot in the corner of our yard next to an old pine to provide shelter and still be visible from our back patio. A few coats of paint, some caulking and some additional support bars were all we needed to setup the new humble abode for our birds.
First field trip outside under the watchful eye of Pancake, the old ranch dog.
This whole time I was doing extensive research on raising backyard chickens including picking up one of my new favorite books and lurking this website. I learned that Andalusians were escape artists and didn’t want to risk losing Blue to the neighbor’s dogs, so we planned on adding a larger run instead of free-ranging as we originally planned. We broke ground under the pine and began the laborious, painstaking, awful, sweaty task of building our 10’x10’ covered run with plenty of vertical space for Blue to jump and fly to her little heart’s content. Total build cost was close to $500. It hurt, but I kept my “told you so” to myself as Husband grumbled about how much more sturdy the run was compared to the pre-fab.
The end of May snuck up on us and suddenly our little floofs were gangly teens too big and boisterous to be confined in the crate. We were like excited parents taking our kids to their first day of school when we let them out to explore the whole run for the first time. Blue was the most curious and charged out, flapping wildly, with Daisy and Poppy squawking behind her. Clover, always the cautious one, decided that the smaller dimensions of the pre-fab run suited her just fine.
Big pile of sticks = easiest, cheapest chicken jungle gym
A few days after their initial introduction to the big run and we figured it was warm enough to let them stay in the coop overnight. We locked them in, went inside and turned up the TV to drown out the shrill peeps of terror coming from the coop. Early the next morning we opened up the hatch to see a puddle of sleeping chicks all alive and comfortable contrary to the screams from the evening before. It took Blue two days to figure out that the coop was home and to march the other gals into it at night. We were so proud!
Yogurt is a good incentive to head back home every night...
The dogs had been watching the chickens grow up right alongside us. They would circle the prefab like hungry sharks, jabbing their noses into the screen until we scolded them or gave them a quick spritz from the hose. One by one our boys fell into line and became less excited by the birds. They weren’t new any more. This lack of interest emboldened us to try and free range under supervision for an hour or two in the evenings and lo-and-behold the dogs were more excited about eating the chicken poop than the actual chickens themselves. The original 1-2 hour timeframe slowly morphed into 3-4 hours then all day with Blue dutifully taking the girls back in at night around 6pm (she’s an old soul). Success!
The chickens were a favorite attraction for Meatball the Pitbull
Keeping chickens became normal. My husband returned to work and I added on the daily poop-scooping and feeding to my list of chores. I found normalcy and a quiet joy in the tedium of washing the dishes while I watched my little birds through my kitchen window. The girls were now a staple in all my scenery. When I gardened they were on the other side of the fence peering through with charming curiosity. When I BBQ’d store bought chicken I joked that Daisy would be the next one on the chopping block if she didn’t stop her squawking. When Poppy would peck at the dots on my flip-flops I’d kick them off and pet her with my feet. And I wasn’t the only one enjoying these little vignettes of faux farm charm. Every day after work the Husband would come in, change into his outdoor shoes, grab a beer and head outside to chill with the cheeps. We were happy.
It’s easy to think that the lazy days will last forever, especially when things are shut down due to a global pandemic. Suddenly caring for four birds wasn’t that much of a chore and I was feeling feisty...
To be continued!
Chapter 1: the Long Beginning that My Husband Saw Coming, But Was Too Polite to Fight Against
There comes a time in every gal’s life when she needs to don her sexiest/sexy-ish (sweatpants are en vogue now) outfit, fix her hair up into something nice, approach her partner and say, “ya know--I’m really bored in quarantine and I’m getting chickens to help me cope.” The husband may grumble, he may say that you’ve already had chickens before and even protest! Just know that once you shove a couple of yellow floofs into his hands that all his crankiness will melt away and he’ll be right beside you digging out trenches for hardware cloth and rinsing poop off the patio.
Or at least that’s been my experience. Except I didn’t do my hair and I’m pretty sure I was wearing the same PJ pants for the __ day in a row. Quarantine had hit us hard just like it had so many other people. We’re a married couple in our early 30s with our own house on a quarter-ish acre in the bustling burbs of Portland, OR (or just outside it, anyway). We’ve got 3 dogs, a cat and a whole bunch of hobbies including gardening, video games, cooking and illustration. Typical PNW peeps. Except a month of doing all your hobbies to your heart’s content, finishing all the major home projects that we’d pushed off and spending too much time in unwashed PJs was really starting to drain us.
Everyone was getting pretty bored of quarantine...
As Easter approached I kept seeing more and more ads pop up for baby chicks CL, and my mom was awaiting the arrival of her new chicks at her ranch down south. Maybe we could do chickens again, I mused. We had chickens at our old home in another county with different chicken ordinances. Chickens had always been on the roster for the new place, but they were never a priority because we had adult things to do like Bills! House renovations! Errands! Social obligations! COVID had swiftly altered our way of living and with a newly cleared garden and a whole lot of time on our hands I figured it was the perfect time to bring on the yard birds. Husband was not so enthused. Sure, he liked the old chickens at the old place, but he was pretty hands off and we got the old girls full grown. In his mind me raising new chicks meant US raising new chicks.
After a few days of melodramatic whining and leaving tabs of chicken breeds open on his laptop he conceded and said that we could bring on a few birds, but they were solely my responsibility. I don’t have kids so this may constitute as the happiest day of my life (let’s not bring up our wedding please). The gal who sold them to me had posted on CL that she had extras due to her 4-H activities being cancelled (along with so many other things) and she needed to offload them ASAP. None of the breeds in her little tractor were what she had posted online and none of them were the ones I wanted. Goodbye dreams of silver flashes from Barred Rocks. Goodbye dreams of roly-poly Faverolles... Hello to my new little peepers: Bluebell the Andalusian and Daisy a BCM whom I bought for $5 each.
Poor Bluebell was already hitting her ugly stage at only one week old!
I spent the next hour listening to their frantic peeping on the drive home. Once I got into the garage the Husband was there waiting and gently lifted the little buggers out of the box. They fell asleep instantly in his hands. Swoon! I knew I married this man for a reason. A few days later we picked up Clover the Barnevelder from another feed store (along with a RIR and Cuckoo Marans as a B-day gift for a friend starting their own chicken journey) and a few days after that and another run to Wilco where I had to scoop up Poppy Girl, the last Buff Orpington chick in the bin. I originally wanted six birds, but after too many disappointing trips to the feed store to see empty bins and too many hatcheries being sold out I settled on a modest flock of four.
We started brooding in a little plastic tote while we rearranged the garage and searched for our old dog crate. Within a week the girls were bounding around a nicely sized playground of pine shavings, sticks and lots of poop. So much poop. I’d never raised fresh babies before, so the amount of sh*t these little nuggets could produce was kind of impressive. The dust was more so. Everything, EVERYTHING within a 3’ radius was coated in dander and dust on the daily. It was like that scene from the Lion King with Mufasa explaining the Simba about the size of their kingdom being everything the light touched except it was our entire garage covered in stinky, awful poop-soot. Husband rigged up a nice cardboard buffer for the edges to bring some semblance of cleanliness back to the garage and to help mitigate any fires from the heat lamp.
The gang's all here! L to R: Clover, Bluebell, Daisy and Poppy.
Then came the hunt for the coop. I tried to convince Husband that building a coop from scratch would be 1. Cheaper and 2. Better. He didn’t bite. We set a budget of $300 and got to hunting which was an ordeal because if we thought finding chicks during a pandemic was difficult, boy were we gonna have a hard time finding a coop! Fortunately, our local Wilco had a single pre-fab in-stock for $299 (a whole $1 savings for us) and we drove down to snag it. We were a sight to see disassembling the packaging and squeezing the panels into our little Mazda sedan. We chose a spot in the corner of our yard next to an old pine to provide shelter and still be visible from our back patio. A few coats of paint, some caulking and some additional support bars were all we needed to setup the new humble abode for our birds.
First field trip outside under the watchful eye of Pancake, the old ranch dog.
This whole time I was doing extensive research on raising backyard chickens including picking up one of my new favorite books and lurking this website. I learned that Andalusians were escape artists and didn’t want to risk losing Blue to the neighbor’s dogs, so we planned on adding a larger run instead of free-ranging as we originally planned. We broke ground under the pine and began the laborious, painstaking, awful, sweaty task of building our 10’x10’ covered run with plenty of vertical space for Blue to jump and fly to her little heart’s content. Total build cost was close to $500. It hurt, but I kept my “told you so” to myself as Husband grumbled about how much more sturdy the run was compared to the pre-fab.
The end of May snuck up on us and suddenly our little floofs were gangly teens too big and boisterous to be confined in the crate. We were like excited parents taking our kids to their first day of school when we let them out to explore the whole run for the first time. Blue was the most curious and charged out, flapping wildly, with Daisy and Poppy squawking behind her. Clover, always the cautious one, decided that the smaller dimensions of the pre-fab run suited her just fine.
Big pile of sticks = easiest, cheapest chicken jungle gym
A few days after their initial introduction to the big run and we figured it was warm enough to let them stay in the coop overnight. We locked them in, went inside and turned up the TV to drown out the shrill peeps of terror coming from the coop. Early the next morning we opened up the hatch to see a puddle of sleeping chicks all alive and comfortable contrary to the screams from the evening before. It took Blue two days to figure out that the coop was home and to march the other gals into it at night. We were so proud!
Yogurt is a good incentive to head back home every night...
The dogs had been watching the chickens grow up right alongside us. They would circle the prefab like hungry sharks, jabbing their noses into the screen until we scolded them or gave them a quick spritz from the hose. One by one our boys fell into line and became less excited by the birds. They weren’t new any more. This lack of interest emboldened us to try and free range under supervision for an hour or two in the evenings and lo-and-behold the dogs were more excited about eating the chicken poop than the actual chickens themselves. The original 1-2 hour timeframe slowly morphed into 3-4 hours then all day with Blue dutifully taking the girls back in at night around 6pm (she’s an old soul). Success!
The chickens were a favorite attraction for Meatball the Pitbull
It’s easy to think that the lazy days will last forever, especially when things are shut down due to a global pandemic. Suddenly caring for four birds wasn’t that much of a chore and I was feeling feisty...
To be continued!
Thanks for sharing!
