Comment on help! by child_of_abba

child_of_abba · 5/2/2025, 2:36:31 PM · permalink

I'm am sorry to hear about your wife's view on chickens.  I cannot understand that mentality and I'm a woman 😂.  
  
Let me tell you about my journey in becoming the crazy chicken lady (I'll try to keep it short, because I have a lot of chicken tending to get to).  
  
We started with 5 hens that a friend gifted us with.  We rent property that happened to have an unfinished coop on it.  We live in the south so the coop is an open air coop so we just added hardware cloth and also buried hardware cloth a few inches down in the ground, surrounding the coop, to prevent predators from digging underneath and entering the coop.  We also built a door with locks (I hear raccoons are pretty smart and can open the doors with simple locks.   
  
A year later we decided to get more hens and purchased 15 unvaxxed chicks from Hoover's Hatchery.  Unfortunately we did lose a few due to some sort of ground predator and/or illness.  We have learned from our trials and errors and have now learned to save chickens from certain ailments, how to prevent them, and secured the area better.   
  
Late last year we decided to order 20 more chicks.  We were expecting all hens, like last time, but were blessed with 2 roosters. And they are very sweet and have different personalities.  Since then we've had 3 hens go broody and now have 12 baby chicks (one that I had to help out of her shell and she almost died).   
  
I clean the coop daily and the poop goes into a compost pile...there is absolutely no smell.  I would have to say, that if the coop were totally enclosed then the smells would build up and you may get an ammonia smell, which is toxic to the chickens.  
  
 Anyways, I have so many stories I could tell, good and bad.  Once again, it's a learning process as I'm still learning.  We truly love our flock and do whatever we can to keep them healthy and happy.  
  
Oh, one more thing...we feed our flock some of our scraps.  If you do that, look up what chickens can eat and can't eat.  Such as they cannot have chocolate, raw onions and potatoes (cooked is ok), and other things.   
  
They really are a joy for me to have around and their eggs are waaaay better than store bought eggs.  Depending on what they ate that day depends on how the eggs taste.  Sometimes our eggs will be very rich in color and other times they're more yellow.  
  
Best of luck to you and I hope your wife changes her mind.  Start small and then grow from there.

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child_of_abba · 5/2/2025, 3:22:55 PM · permalink

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