Hi all, forgive me as I know I could probably do a search and find most of my answers but felt like asking instead!
We have 12 ten month old hens right now. Have 5-6 more coming in a month (yay). We're trying to figure out how to let them cohabitate eventually. We have a fairly large run and when the weather finally warms up (sometime at the end of april or may) we plan on moving the new ones down into the run with their own small coop (we have a large coop for the girls right now) and fence them off from the main coop. If that sounds confusing - the main coop and little coop would all be contained inside the run but we would put up an extra "fence wall" to keep the little ones from being in with the bigger girls until they're closer in size. No problem so far, but I'm getting there.....
We let the big girls free range all day in the spring/summer/fall. Once the little ones are around 12 weeks old we'd like to let them join in as well. BUT, how do you feed them all? The big girls need layer and the little ones can't have it til 18 weeks. So, what do we do for that 6 weeks that we'd like them to start free ranging? Is there an easy trick? I have read you can buy feed that's more geared to a whole flock and put out oyster shells (we already do the shells) for the layers but will it still have everything needed to produce nice eggs? We have quite a few customers already and I don't want to disappoint them for the 6 weeks that we're not sure what to do about feed! Any help would be appreciated! We're hoping by keeping them close to each other then letting them co-mingle at 12 weeks they might all get along better and we can move the small girls in the big coop with the big girls. Thanks!
We have 12 ten month old hens right now. Have 5-6 more coming in a month (yay). We're trying to figure out how to let them cohabitate eventually. We have a fairly large run and when the weather finally warms up (sometime at the end of april or may) we plan on moving the new ones down into the run with their own small coop (we have a large coop for the girls right now) and fence them off from the main coop. If that sounds confusing - the main coop and little coop would all be contained inside the run but we would put up an extra "fence wall" to keep the little ones from being in with the bigger girls until they're closer in size. No problem so far, but I'm getting there.....
We let the big girls free range all day in the spring/summer/fall. Once the little ones are around 12 weeks old we'd like to let them join in as well. BUT, how do you feed them all? The big girls need layer and the little ones can't have it til 18 weeks. So, what do we do for that 6 weeks that we'd like them to start free ranging? Is there an easy trick? I have read you can buy feed that's more geared to a whole flock and put out oyster shells (we already do the shells) for the layers but will it still have everything needed to produce nice eggs? We have quite a few customers already and I don't want to disappoint them for the 6 weeks that we're not sure what to do about feed! Any help would be appreciated! We're hoping by keeping them close to each other then letting them co-mingle at 12 weeks they might all get along better and we can move the small girls in the big coop with the big girls. Thanks!
