New here..where to start?

[griggy]

Hi all,
We are new to the forum and to chickens in general. We currently have 4 Dominique hens who we are in love with! We just moved to a little farmette in an attempt to live more naturally and healthy. Our little girl, age 8, has three brain tumors and we want to feed her as healthy as possible so we are trying to grow our own food and raise our own chickens.

We are interested in hatching our eggs and we've read about what we need to do so...but how do you get the eggs to hatch?? Thanks so much for having us!

 

[Ridgerunner]

That’s a pretty wide open question. I’m not sure where to start so I’ll be pretty general and simplistic.

First, you need a rooster to fertilize the eggs or get fertile eggs from somewhere.

Then they need to be incubated. It’s possible one of your hens will go broody and take care of the whole process for you. But you cannot control when or even if a hen will ever go broody.

The way you control that is to get an incubator and hatch them yourself. You’ll also need a brooder because you’ll have to raise them yourself.

Like I said, this is simplistic. There are a whole lot of details that can go with any of these. I suggest you look in the Learning Center up on top of this page and just hang around reading interesting posts. After you do a little homework, you’ll have a better feel for what specific information you want.

Ask those specific questions by making more posts. No one is paid to answer questions on here but there are a lot of experienced people glad to help. I suggest you title your threads in a way to get the attention of people you want to read it. A title of “Help!” is not going to distinguish your thread at all, but a title of “Egg Fertility” should attract people that know about egg fertility. I also suggest you modify your profile or signature so we can tell what part of the world you live in. I don’t mean your street address but whether you are in Australia, Scotland, Congo, Idaho, or Florida might make a difference in how we answer some things.

Where are my manners? Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined us and hope you stick around.