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I agree, a good post for a sticky!
Got the coop light thing going for several weeks now (they have 14 hours a day of daylight as recommended by numerous sources). Got them on the right food. Yes, they free range, but our backyard isn't very big and we do daily checks in every nook and cranny of our yard, under this, over that, behind the other... literally every inch of our yard is checked daily. I have a friend who also has hatchery chicks she acquired this year whose birds are the same age as mine, and she has no eggs, either. Her birds have at least had wattles and combs for several months now, but still no eggs. My RIR is just barely starting to show signs of developing teeny tiny wattles but no real comb. The BR is showing some teeny tiny comb but no wattles. Both are moderately pink in the face but nothing like the red in the face that my EE got or that our leghorn had when she started laying or like I have seen in photographs of other people's chickens. (Our leghorn has since gotten eggbound and passed away.)
We have made jokes about eating the RIR and BR if they don't produce come first of the year, as they will be over 9 months old at that point. I love my birds and they are primarily pets, but we got into this for the eggs. If I'm not going to get eggs from this flock, I'm going to get other chickens. I will definitely get my next birds from a better source... the guy I got these birds from is out of business now... presented himself as a breeder, turned out he just bought hatchery chicks from the feed store, raised them and sold them and lied about their ages. 0-2 month old chicks were supposed to be $3, 2-4 month old chicks $5, 4-6 month old pullets $8. We paid $8 apiece for them and were told they were not quite four months old, about 3-1/2 months except for the EE who was supposedly 4-1/2 months (and supposedly was a purebred Ameraucana, supposedly hatched from a bright blue egg... yah, I don't bloody think so). At any rate, the chickens were actually 6 weeks old at the time, except for the EE who was about a month older and double the size of everybody else (they're all the same now, though). Here we are six full months later, thinking we would have eggs within a couple of months, and our chooks aren't even maturing.
I don't know ANYONE who wouldn't be disappointed and a little ticked off at this point. I think this guy sold me duds. So far, only 2 of the 6 chickens he sold me have laid anything, and one of those got eggbound 6 weeks into laying and died. I ran into him at a poultry auction a couple of months ago and gave him the ol' stinkeye, tho. LOL.
