A Chick Post

The Acheson and Ivester farms both got baby chicks on the same day this spring!  Gretchen and Lanier decided to do a joint post to share all about our new baby chicks and spring on the farm…

by Gretchen Acheson

Chick Day.  Our local feed store has three “Chick Days” each spring.  Everyone from moderate-scale chicken farmers to backyard poultry keepers place their orders weeks in advance.  The hatcheries make sure to have just the right number of eggs ready to hatch out the day before chick day.  And when the little fluffy guys and gals show their pretty little heads outside the eggs, they are boxed up and mailed overnight to our feed store.  The nutrition that was in their egg yolk keeps their tummies from growling until the time we pick them up, take them home, dip their beaks in water, and give them all the food they will eat.  It’s a pretty amazing process.  But we have a pretty amazing Creator Who designed the baby chicks!

This year we had the feed store save us eighteen Barred Rock Pullets (pullets are hens-or female chicks).  Last year we bought mostly Red Sexlink Pullets (”sexlink” means they are bred so that the boys are one color, the girls another, for easy gender identification of baby chicks).  We plan to cycle through our favorite breeds every few years, buying a different breed each year, so we know which birds are older and need to be culled out without having to band them (put a “bracelet” on one of their legs) or guess at their age.

But we never can stick with just one breed.  Our customers like green eggs, so we bought four Araucana Pullets this year (our Ameraucanas didn’t winter too well, so we thought we’d try the other green egg layers).   And those Silver Laced Wynadottes were just too cute.  Four of those pullets came home with us as well.  Which made for an even two bakers’ dozens of baby chickens!  At least we got out of the feed store without the rabbit Ruth Ann was squealing in delight over.  She was excited enough about the chicks themselves to scare the poor things half to death.

Our little babies have spent the last week in a feed bin, protected by chicken wire, warmed by a heat lamp, with a blanket over the top for extra insulation against our cold nights.  We’re still working on ideas for a brooder we can use year after year.  At least now we have a shed where their temporary home can reside!  Last spring it was so cold our baby chicks hung out in the middle of my kitchen for their first week of life.  Between the hungry, peeping chicks and the hungry, crying baby girl I didn’t get any sleep!

Yes, a brooder house is going to be a project for another spring-the shed area we park our cars has been ample protection for the chicks this spring.  Meanwhile Merritt has been making all sorts of modifications to our “Chick Inn“-the latest is slanting the bottom of the laying boxes so that the eggs roll down into a covered area where we can retrieve them but the chickens can’t.  Not only does this help with the egg eating problems that rear their ugly heads once in a while when the hens get too bored, but the best part is that in our muddy springs and autumns the eggs still stay relatively clean-because as soon as they are laid, they slide away into safety!

And the chicks aren’t the only signs of spring activity here on the farm.  The chives in my herb garden are already several inches tall-or were, before the hens got to them.  The rhubarb is poking up its curly head.  And I could nearly use the parsley if I wanted to!  My amazing, hard-working husband is building me a pretty little fence around my herb garden this spring, too-now that it is at its permanent location next to our new shed.  The wire is smaller at the bottom so the hens won’t get to my herbs-yet tall enough to keep out the deer who have already trimmed my Sweet Williams and Primroses!

Today when we replaced the wood shavings in the bottom of the chicks’ tub, Ru took turns kissing each of the baby chicks (though sometimes it looked more like she was just smelling them-what did my grown-up nose miss?!).  After she petted the soft feathers on one of our week-old chicks she reached up and patted her own fuzzy head.  We never cease to be amazed at all the correlations she makes at just 16 months old.  I s’pose next year she’ll be able to take care of the baby chicks all by herself, just from helping Daddy this year.

But right now, my farmer is out harrowing our field, and Ru was promised a ride before bedtime.  So off we go to meet Daddy for Ruth’s first tractor ride…

by Lanier Ivester

I’ll never forget the first brood of chicks we brought home. Never ones to waste time becoming experts before we jump in with both feet, Philip and I went to the local feed and seed on a whim one Monday morning and brought home the last ten Rhode Island Reds they had. I had no idea how adorable they would be, or how my maternal instincts would kick in at the sound of all that helpless peeping coming from the cardboard box in which they spent their first 24 hours in our household on top of the washing machine. The cramped quarters and the prowling cats below called for immediate action, however, and the next night saw us constructing a wooden frame brooder, encased with poultry netting, that we could keep in the basement. This brooder has served us well over the eight years that we have kept hens—although, like Gretchen, I’ve sometimes lost sleep over all the restless little happy noises coming from right below my bed!

A new brood of chicks is one of the sweetest signs of spring to me, and though most of my motherly neurosis has been calmed with time and experience, there is always such a sense of responsibility and awe that these lovely, vulnerable creatures are entirely dependent on me for their lives and safety. I will never forget the night, several Aprils ago, when one of our famously-violent spring storms ripped through, sending us to an inner closet with Caspian and the cats until the tornado sirens had wailed their last. Then, creeping out in the eerie stillness after wind and hail, groping around in the darkness for matches and candles and flashlights and counting cats and moaning over storm-rent flowers, I suddenly caught the sound of a faint peeping, timid at first, then rising to a shrill note of distress. We ran down to the basement to find all the babies huddled in a heap, limp and listless from the rapid temperature change and the loss of heat from the lamps they depended upon for warmth. Scooping them all into an old portable wooden brooder, we carted them upstairs and placed them on the hearth in our bedroom. Philip built a fire and I tended it all night, waking every time the chirping complaint started up again to stoke up the coals and add another log. In the morning they were all comfortably asleep, with their little heads all stretched out between the slats of the brooder towards the waning warmth of the fire. Fortunately our power came back on, for we were completely out of firewood!

This spring we moved the brooder to the barn, into the stall Philip has fitted out as a hen house. (Fort Poulet, the legendary domain of Ivester hens has been decommissioned as of last fall.) And there the babies reside with the big girls and Margot the rooster all clucking disinterestedly about them. Truthfully, the sheep have been much more curious than anyone else, owing to the fact, perhaps, that the chicks are their new next-door neighbors. For the first day they all stood in their stall and stared—as only sheep can—at these strange little interlopers. It’s given even more life to our old barn, to have the sweet noises of baby chicks blending with all the baa-ing and bleating and hay-munching and crowing. And only one incident thus far: it’s been a long time since I’ve raised chicks with outside cats, and, stupid me, I completely misinterpreted Maudie’s fascination as the general interest everyone showed when I brought the chicks into the barn with a regular parade of sheep and dogs and goats in tow. I hadn’t stepped out of the stall for a moment—with the lid to the brooder safely closed—when I heard one of my Buff Orpingtons peeping in alarm. Dropping the waterer I was filling, I raced back to find that Maudie, with a lightning-flash dart of her sleek black paw through the poultry netting, had snagged one of them. I was so horrified that I didn’t know what to do at first, just standing there in the stall with the tiny, frightened creature in my hands. She was definitely in shock, and so with one of those desperate prayers for help and wisdom, I performed a little chick first aid. I set her up on the kitchen counter in the box I’d brought her home in, with a heat lamp clipped to the cabinet overhead and a little food and water. Thankfully, after a few hours she was perfectly fine, preening and pecking and scratching in that funny little imitation of the big hens that chicks have, so I was able to take her back to the barn to join her sisters again.

We were only going to get eight this year. Don’t ask me how we walked out with thirteen. But those little Buff Orpingtons were so sweet, and, of course, I had to have four each of the Rhode Island Reds and the Araucanas! (The former for old time’s sake and the latter because I have become so enamored with those blue and green eggs I just don’t think I could do without them.) And what’s a brood without a few Barred Rocks, those docile, dependable layers? That makes twenty-six in all—so many that my livestock guardian dogs Juno and Diana have started to look askance at me, as much as to say, “Um, how many charges are written into our contracts?”

In other spring news, it’s garden season again! Our spring comes on earlier than Gretchen’s, but I did manage to reign in my excitement at mid-seventy degree weather a few weeks ago and wait until the prescribed middle of April to put out my summer vegetables. Squash, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers and pole beans (my favorite!) all made it into the manure-rich (compliments of Puck and Pansy) soil this Saturday, and my tomatoes will go out later this week. It’s a season of industry and excitement around here—and a never-ending to-do list. But lest the everyday miracles of budding roses and blooming irises and a flower garden waking up from a long winter’s nap go unnoticed in all the flurry, my husband is good to take my hand and slow me down for a bit with a little ramble through the woods to admire the bluebells we planted last fall or the almost mystical reappearance of the mayapples under the oak trees.

Oh, and why, you might ask, is my rooster named Margot? Well, both the hatchery and the feed store from which we get out chicks each spring have an unwritten guarantee that all the chicks are female. Margot wasn’t.

And for the record, Gret, Ruth’s on to something. The chicks do smell very sweet and feathery. There’s nothing quite like a nose-full of warm, peeping down for happiness!