The Chickens

Well I finally got my chickens that I had been wanting for so long. We talked about getting them a while ago and even bought all the stuff for John to make the coop but we never got around to it. When Spring time came all the feed stores were selling baby chicks and we decided to get some. We started out with 4 baby chicks..we bought these chicks from a flea market and they were sold straight run (meaning they had not been sexed). We dont eat eggs every day so we decided that 3 hens would be plenty for us. Since we were unsure of the sex of the chicks we decided to get 4 hoping that 2 or 3 of them would be hens. They were 10 days old when we brought them home...there isnt much cuter than a little tiny baby chick :) A couple days after we got them I got to thinking how sad I would be if all of them turned out to be roosters (cant keep roosters in city limits) and I decided to get 2 more from a feed store by our house that had chicks that had been sexed..that way I would be sure I at least had 2 females. So a week later I brought home 2 more 3 day old baby chicks. I knew 6 chickens would be more than I needed but I figured out if they all did turn out to be hens I could give away a couple and keep the ones I wanted for us. The man at the feed store told me that around 4 weeks old the roos will usually have a much larger comb on their head than the hens..all of mine have pretty small combs so I am now thinking that maybe we do have all hens (we wont really know until they start laying eggs or crowing lol) We kept them in the house for the first month and we just moved them out to their coop about a week and a half ago. We are down to 5 now because the dog got ahold of one (long unpleasant story). They are doing great out in their coop and we are hoping they will start laying in about another month and a half. We have 3 Rhode Island Reds that are supposed to be very good productive egg layers and they lay brown eggs and we have 2 ameracaunas that wont lay quite as many but they lay blue and green eggs so we thought that would be neat!! Cant wait to enjoy fresh eggs from my own backyard!!!