I got tired of paying $5 for a doz eggs claiming to be free range and not really knowing if they were or not. That and I wanted something to help me control bugs and I thought chickens would be great at it.
I was looking at fencing online at TSC and saw their ad for spring chicks. Thought it would be fun for me and the kids and I was right.If we did not have a resident hawk it would be perfect! We look forward to getting more hens and maybe even a rooster.
When I was around ten or eleven, my friend's mother had a bunch of a chickens for the eggs, so my friend had grown up with chickens and loved them. We were at a feed store one day and there were some feral roosters running around. The feed store complained about them, so we decided we'd catch all the roosters and my friend Louisa would take them home and add them to her flock. We spent a few hours a day for about a week or two catching the roosters with a big fish net. It was so much fun chasing them all around and catching them! The last rooster, and the hardest to catch, was a little red bantam rooster. When we caught him, I fell in love with him and decided to keep him. From there, of course, I needed a few hens, and everything just went downhill from there.
Silverphoenix - lovely story! My story is pretty wacky. I saw a phot of chickens in an ornamental garden & wanted some. Wacky is that I never managed to get an ornamental garden & if I did, I know I couldn't put my chooks in it!
My grandad had chickens on his farm when I was a little girl. I loved them so much!! I swore someday I would have my OWN chickens. Flash forward many years later and my future DH and I were talking about what was in our future. I looked at him and said " All I really want is a place of our own, a great guy to love me like crazy, a bunch of cats, some kids and at least 3 chickens," He just looked at me and blinked for a min and said "Chickens?" So flash forward AGAIN 10 years and we are here today...I have the house, a guy that loves me like crazy, 5 cats, (still working on the kids lol), and 9 chickens. And the crazy Brit I married loves my cats and chickens like mad as well So it all worked out well!! He told me the other day that he never thought he would be living with chickens in the back garden lol Let alone bringing him over to the dark side and turning him into a Chicken Addict also
I saw an ad on Craigslist back in 2006, someone looking for a home for her 3 pet chickens, I thought it was so neat! She found a home closer to where she lived and I never did get those three chickens, but that set me off looking up how to take care of them and what they needed etc.. which brought me to BYC. the rest is history!
My husbands grand dad was a chicken farmer, for eggs and meat. They have down in their basement two of the old incubator cabinets. They don't use them of course but is neat to see them still there. His daughter, my husbands mom, took over the farm and she started giving us eggs when she had surplus. I was hooked. This liitle green horn from NJ decided she wanted hens. His mom gave us 4 pullets 5 years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter. Then she gave us a few more the next spring and we hatched some from my broody Br hens. We now have 16 hens, 9 pullets and 3 of the original group of hens that she gave us. I guess they are happy and healthy b/c they still give me eggs through the spring and summer They are alot of work, but they are fun to be around and my kids loved having the baby chicks this spring. and of course the eggs are a definite bonus
Ever since my mom went through chemo six years ago she hasn't been able to eat regular store bought eggs (unless they were organic) without getting sick. I always thought it would be kinda fun to have a few chickens and used my mom's situation as a justification that I needed to buy some chicks this past Spring. Thanksgiving she got her first eggs delivered from my girls. No surprise that she didn't get sick.
Grandfarther had them and always took me to the new england bantam club shows. I knew i was destined to have them Maxx thats cool your friend got you into them. Im happy to say i got a friends into it too. Now if everyone could get one person into chickens the chicken comminity would swell up again!
