If you are planning on blue chicks for Silkies it will take several weeks before you'll know what sex they are. I hope you get hens! Our first two chickens were brother and sister Partridge Silkies (the boy was supposed to be a "pullet" -- surprise, surprise! and he had to be rehomed) Silkie hens are so annoyingly broody that we considered giving the remaining Partridge away but she was so incredibly sweet that we centered all our flock additions around her. She is 4 y/o now and dainty and sweet as ever! If a breed or hen didn't play nice with her it was rehomed. We have discovered that not all chickens are the same -- not all bantams are the same either. Some breeds are combative and some are non-combative gentles. Now we mix nothing with the Silkies but gentle breeds weighing 5-lbs or under. We sacrificed dual purpose/egg layers in order to have breeds that got along with the Silkies. So far we won't consider mixing anything in with Silkies except for Ameraucana, Araucana, Breda, Cochin, Easter Egger, Faverolles, Houdan, Polish, or Sultan because these are basically non-combative/gentle breeds usually in the 5-lb-and-under weight range. The Faverolles and Cochin are a heavier breed but are so incredibly docile that they usually don't fight back and get heavily picked on by other LF. There are other gentle giants like Brahma, Jersey Giant, Sussex, etc but because these weigh in the 7 to 9 lb range we hesitate to add them to our under-5-lb group of gentles. We wanted to experiment with a Dominique pullet in our gentle flock but we lost her to a sudden seizure so we don't know how she would've blended with the gentles. Dom pullets are friendly and usually weigh 4[SUP]1/2[/SUP] lbs but we never got to find out how she would've turned out.