Hello my fellow Hoosiers, this is my first post on BYC. My wife and I live in Eaton, IN and we work in Muncie. We recently purchased our first home and a few acres with a pond. We are new to rural living but we love it. We are starting our first garden this summer and we're ready to take the plunge and get some chickens. I'm a forum addict so I naturally sought out to find this site. I'll try to use the Search function so that I don't wear you out with novice questions.
I've agreed to (attempt to) build my wife a tractor coop. I'm a college professor so naturally I don't have any skills.
Regardless, after looking at several of the coops on this site I've gotten an idea of what's required and I think I can handle building her a tractor with 21 sq ft of outside space for the chickens (12 sq ft of coop space not including the nesting boxes). Based on what I've read, that should enable us to house 4-5 regular sized chickens. I stopped into Rural King yesterday and saw that they had an order form and a "chart" of available breeds to order. I decided it was probably wise to do a little more research before placing an order.
We are primarily interested in eggs and we are more concerned with temperament than egg or feather color. We have two friendly dogs and we'll have a baby on the way before too long. It appears some breeds are more "friendly" than others. Also, I like the idea of allowing the chickens out of the pen and into the yard. Would we be better off with regular chickens rather than bantams given that we often have hawks and eagles in the area?
After looking at the breeds on this site (and cross-referencing them on other sites) I've taken note of a few breeds that might work for us including: Speckled Sussex, Welsummer, Wyandotte, Plymouth Rock, and maybe a Golden Sex Link. I'm unsure if these 5 breeds get along OK but it appears they can all stand our cold Indiana winters. I'm also unsure if Rural King carries any of these breeds but it appears some of them can be found on Craigslist. More than anything I just wanted to make sure that buying from Rural King wasn't the equivalent of buying a dog from a puppy mill. I'm still not sure if I'm better off going through Rural King or Craigslist.
On a final note, are we better off ordering now or waiting a few weeks for sexed pullets? I'm afraid that if I order chicks now we will end up with a bunch of roosters. But I'm afraid if I wait 3-4 weeks there won't be many chicks available once people who pre-ordered get theirs.
Whoa... this ended up being much longer than I intended. Thank you for guiding me along. I've learned a tremendous amount from this site already and I look forward to learning a lot more.
