humblehillsfarm
Crazy chicken lady
Here's what I did but I realize not everyone has the resources for this: I built a small A-frame coop for my babies. The coop was placed directly against the fence for the adult birds. As the little bird grew, I added a fence around the door to the A-frame coop to allow the babies to leave and explore. Part of the fence was still shared with the big birds. The big birds would try to peck at the babies through the fence but the babies would still go and check them out. When the babies were about 16 weeks old and maybe 90-95% of their full-grown size I put them in the same coop as the big birds at night. There were about 2-3 days of mild kerfuffle and then all was calm. This did mean prematurely switching the babies to layer feed and it was another two months before they started laying but that was a year ago and so far all the chickens are healthy.
