Our Urban Farming Experiment Continues to Take on Wings, Literally… Our Flock of Backyard Chickens!

I guess if you have to pick one positive thing about the whole COVID-19 thing and the subsequent “shelter in place thing”, for me it would have to be the ability to get caught up on thousands of household projects that I had been putting off or thinking about that were still unchecked on my working list of things to do… well, one of those projects was to get some backyard chickens.

My main purpose for wanting some chickens was for educational purposes, I knew Spencer would immediately become interested –and he did. We initially picked up 13 Black Australorp chicks at our local Tractor Supply store. They were so tiny. We initially kept them in my office in a large galvanized watering trough w/ high intensity heat lamps on them. After a few weeks passed by they began to grow considerably right before our eyes. Spencer would always help w/ the water and feeding and had no issues at all reaching down and grabbing one of the baby chicks if we asked him to.

Ultimately, the chicks were large enough to move outside so we purchased a chicken coop online that required some assembly. It’s a really nice coop but w/ 13 growing girls, they quickly outgrew the chicken run area and we knew we were going to need to do something larger.

One day we were at Tractor Supply to pickup some supplies for a few weekend projects and noticed that they had just received a shipment of bantam chicks. It didn’t take long before we had a box w/ 10 more chicks in it heading home. We’ve been raising these girls (so we thought) in my office just like the other group and as of a few weeks ago this group has made their way into the main coop. Oh, by the way… we had to build a larger coop for these birds, that now number 23… we ended up w/ a huge area of our yard now allocated to chicks (and we now know that about 5 of our bantams are roosters).

At any rate, it’s been a lot of work that we’ve gotten to do as a family and it’s been incredibly educational for Spencer, we hope to start seeing some eggs in the coming weeks from the Black Australorps… stay tuned.