How do you manage having different breeds?? and fertile eggs??

[SportTees]

How many breeds of birds do you keep to use for hatching eggs? I have a few breeds that I plan to use for eggs to eat. Could I thow them in my breeding pens if they lay different shades of eggs? I was thinking about throwing some of the extra hens in with the BCM's - I think I would be able to tell the difference in the eggs since they lay such dark eggs. I also have banties and large birds I was thinking of mixing- would the banties be able breed the large chickens? Dh does not want to build more cages then absolutely necessary so I need to figure out what I could put together.

I have

12+ Buff orp's
7+ Cochins of different colors

Trios of
BCM
Speckles Sussex
Delaware

Random hens
2 silkies
1 mix rock
1 ee
1 serma

Plus unsexed chicks that's hens will end up in the mix- welsummer, frizzle, polish, wyandotte, austrolorp

and few extra roo's I want to keep
1 RIR
1 banty turken

I currently have 3 lrg pens for the chickens and 1 pen for the roen ducks + my free range Scovies and 1 lone turkey that is pened with the chicks

am I over thinking this ??

 

[popcornpuppy]

My opinion is that you are overthinking it. As long as all of the chickens get along, let nature take it's course. I have a RIR roo that has fertilized eggs from a polish hen. The RIR is a brown egg layer and the polish lays white. I can't tell you what the offspring will be like because the eggs are in the bator right now. But nature took it's course with our chickens and all has been well, hope you have the same luck.
Just think of it this way................
chickens have done thier thing for thousands of years and have survived and continued on without incubators and brooder boxes. Nature knows how to take care of it's own, man is still learning.

 

[Chicky Tocks]

If you have three pens, then you can separate your flock by putting them all together in two of the pens and then use the third pen to breed any specific breed of chicken that you have.

Then when you're not breeding, you can just use the pen to hold what you will.

 

[TXmom]

I have 15 chickens who are all together (3 of them roos). As soon as one of my girlies goes broody (I think one of my EE's is thinking about it...), I'm putting all different eggs under her. Eventually I'll have a rainbow of baby chicks, and I'm excited about that

If you want to sell hatching eggs, then of course you'd be better off with purebreds or specific "mixes". It all depends on what your plans are....

 

[Steve_of_sandspoultry]

If you want to breed them true you will need to seperate them by breeds, if you have them running together you are just making mixed chickens.

Steve in NC

 

[gocrow77]

My plans are to have a mixed flock consisting of a few pure breeds. I plan to have a "breeding coop" and run to put any birds that I want pure eggs from for about a month or so. Then, when I have the pure eggs I am wanting to hatch or sell and am done breeding them for the time being I can them rotate another group of bird into my breeding coop for a similar time period for a different batch of pure eggs. I don't plan to breed any of them on a grand scale so this arrangement will work fine for me. I don't know how big you plan to do things so this arrangement might not work well for you.

 

[SportTees]

o.k. If I use only 1 pen for breeding - how long after I separate them would it take until I have pure eggs?

 

[patandchickens]

Three or four weeks, depending how conservative you want to be i.e. how sure of purebred eggs you want to be. That's the time elapsed between isolating them and starting to collect/use eggs, so if you then want to get, say, 10 days of egg collection for a setting in an incubator, you're looking at a total of 4-6 weeks per breed.

Watch out with the thing about mixing them when you think you know you can tell eggs apart and thus would just not set the 'wrong' hens' eggs... I have one golden campine in with my speckled sussexes, which means all I ahve to do is not set any white eggs, yet she has somehow bamboozled (hypnotized? mind controlled?) me into setting *four* of her eggs accidentally over two settings, so I have these mutts running around now that nobody is likely to particularly want

(In defense, I should say that some of the sussexes' eggs are extremely pale

)

Good luck, have fun,

Pat