Chickens

This past Saturday Ed and I went to a farm auction in Kutztown PA. This auction is held every spring to benefit the Amish and Mennonite schools in that area. The local community brings donations that are then sold to help the schools.

They have everything from home interior, quilts, farm equipment, yard equipment, animals and much much more.

While we where there we of course had to check out the animals. They manly had fowl and rabbit, one family did bring a horse to be sold. The birds where everything from chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys to pigeons, quails and guinea hens. They had peeps and ducklings also, so while we waited for the auctioneer we checked things out. They had a lot of Americana Peeps these will lay colored eggs when they reach maturity.

The auctioneer finally arrived and the bidding started. I will tell you that I got all the Americana Peeps, all sixty three of them. I know, I know that’s a lot of peeps, but here me out, if you would purchase them for a hatchery they would cost from $2.00 / $3.00 a piece. That in itself isn’t bad. I certainly would not have purchased sixty three of them, maybe a dozen. At the auction, are you ready for this I paid a mere $0.35 a piece for them. Now do you see my logic, In reality there is going to be some loss from predators so having this many chickens is not that big a deal and since they were strait run I don’t know how many are male and female. If there are manly boys then I will have to get rid of some of them since they don’t lays eggs.

We brought are little four day old guys and gals home. With some stops at a feed and farm store to get supplies. Set them up under a heat lamp, feed and watered them and they are doing real well.

These are the little ones after we first got them home.

Now they are a week old and growing fast, I started them on grit today. That is to help them digest there food since they don’t have teeth the grit helps to pulverize there food. As they get bigger I will be separating them into multiple containers so they have more room. Below you will find some pictures that I took today.

  They look like little hams posing for the picture

What I have been doing is holding them a little each day so they get used to humans. Some like it, others do not that’s fine because they will. We would like to have educational demos at the farm and I would like all the animals to friendly with the guest adults and children.

My goal is to keeps you up to date with there progress so check back once a week to see how they are.