Hello!
I am completely new to chicken keeping (in fact I don't actually have any yet), though I've been thinking of it for a while.
So far, a friend and I are planning to order silkie eggs from peekaboo silkies (if we can get them on eggbid.com), and a day-old female chicks (silver sebright, mille fleur belgian d'uccles, and a couple of cochins) from mypetchicken.com. And I'm looking for somewhere to get porcelain or, even better, blue/buff d'uccles (any ideas on the buff/blue type?). Now that I've found this forum, however, I'm hoping that maybe we can find some local breeders that we can go visit in person...
I'm thinking of building my own, slightly larger version of the City Biddy Chicken coop, raised with a slide-out sand tray underneath and an attached 4x7 run. I'm interested to do a bit more research on how the chicken tractor-style movable runs handle predator issues, since that seems to be a major concern of a lot of DIY chicken run builders (what with the burying of hardware cloth at least a foot all around, etc), so I'll check around the forum for tips.
I'll post it in the city laws section as well, but Somerville, MA is very pet chicken-friendly: the city is fine with it, all of our neighbors are looking forward to meeting our girls, and even the elementary school next door is hoping that the kids can learn more about where their food comes from by having chickens next door to their playground!
I am so hooked!
I am completely new to chicken keeping (in fact I don't actually have any yet), though I've been thinking of it for a while.
So far, a friend and I are planning to order silkie eggs from peekaboo silkies (if we can get them on eggbid.com), and a day-old female chicks (silver sebright, mille fleur belgian d'uccles, and a couple of cochins) from mypetchicken.com. And I'm looking for somewhere to get porcelain or, even better, blue/buff d'uccles (any ideas on the buff/blue type?). Now that I've found this forum, however, I'm hoping that maybe we can find some local breeders that we can go visit in person...
I'm thinking of building my own, slightly larger version of the City Biddy Chicken coop, raised with a slide-out sand tray underneath and an attached 4x7 run. I'm interested to do a bit more research on how the chicken tractor-style movable runs handle predator issues, since that seems to be a major concern of a lot of DIY chicken run builders (what with the burying of hardware cloth at least a foot all around, etc), so I'll check around the forum for tips.
I'll post it in the city laws section as well, but Somerville, MA is very pet chicken-friendly: the city is fine with it, all of our neighbors are looking forward to meeting our girls, and even the elementary school next door is hoping that the kids can learn more about where their food comes from by having chickens next door to their playground!
I am so hooked!
