Back during the first week of February, I started selling eggs and delivering them to people I know who wanted to be put on an egg route. I am happy to say that my demand now is greater than what our chickens are producing and it is time for me to start shopping for some baby chicks. When we first decided to get chickens, we inherited some from my husband's cousin who had lived in the country and was moving back to the city and also some from the older man who lives in front of us who was tired of taking care of his chickens. They all were fairly old, but we were getting a fair amount of eggs from them. After butchering some of the non-layers (I found a great method for making chicken stock and getting meat from the chickens at the same time and canning everything!!! I'll share it another time) and having a few get eaten by chicken hawks and a dog (nothin' yer can do wit a chicken eat'n dog sep shoot um'---or keep them in your barn until you find someone who'll take him), we were down to 10 or so chickens and decided to buy chicks. We learned alot from raising the chicks and out of 25, only 13 survived. Turns out that dogs, weasels and hawks really like chicken.
As of right now, we have about seven of the origional chickens and thirteen new ones. We have one old rooster (his name is Cletus) and one new rooster (his name is Firebird). The old ones were mixed breed, but mostly brown layers and the new ones are all araucanas, the kind that lay the colored eggs.
Since my egg demand now outweighs the supply and it is time to buy new chickens, I've been looking at the chicken catalogues trying to find what breed I want to buy. Honestly, I would love a mix. That is one thing I like about the araucanas, they all look different. The problem is they are cheaper to buy in quantity and the smallest quantity is usually around 25. My husband doesn't want to get arucanas again and thinks he wants a good laying breed. I like the colored eggs, but if we aren't getting araucanas, then I want to get brown layers. I know...they don't taste any different from white eggs, but I do like the aesthetics of brown and colored eggs and I just enjoy cooking with them more. I associate white eggs with those thin, watery, tasteless eggs that are on sale for 89 cents every week at the grocery. It's weird, but when I see all those white perfectly shaped eggs that come in the carton from the grocery, I forget that they came from something living. It is almost like they come from an egg factory somewhere. I guess they would kind of have to in order to get that many perfectly uniform eggs. I'm really not one of those animal right's hippies, but the whole chicken farming thing is a little creepy--and I don't think the results are culinarily worth it. I don't know why more people don't have a few chickens in their yard and get their eggs that way. As long as the zoning doesn't prohibit it, it is pretty easy. But I digress....
So my husband is looking at buying red star sex linked chicks. I would prefer Rhode Island Reds. My husband also is entertaining the idea of getting some meat birds, like Jumbo Cornish X Rocks. Those chickens creep me out a little because they have been genetically bread to have the huge breasts (okay...any guys reading my blog can quit giggling now...) and they look like mutants. You have to butcher them at 10 weeks or else they get so big their legs can't support them anymore!
By the way, I realized that I can upload pictures to my blog. For those of you who read it on a regular basis...you are the coolest people in the whole world...but you might want to check back on previous blogs in the future to see if I uploaded pictures for them. It may take me a week or so with our super slow satellite internet!!!!!
I think we'll go with the sex link. The main advantage to the sex link chickens is they lay about a month earlier than the RIR. They also should have a better feed conversion ratio - and being sex linked - if you buy 25 hens - you'll get 25 hens. Sexing chickens isn't fool proof and you always get a couple of cockerels in with your layers - but with the sex links, the male and female are different colors at birth - so no guesswork.
ReplyDeleteOnce we start incubating our eggs, a flock of straight RIR might be the way to go - since sex links are hybrid, their offspring won't have the same characteristics - so no good for breeding.
I also think that instead of the Jumbo X rock mutants we'll just get a few misc. cockerels along with the spring layers. They don't develop meat as fast and their feed/meat conversion isn't as good. But it will allow us to raise them with the rest of the chickens and butcher as we want to - instead of being on a tight time schedule. We'll just have to butcher them before they start fighting. And for our purposes - canned chicken meat - that will work just fine I think. We don't need fryer's anyways - that's what the rabbits are for. :)