In The Beginning...

It all started with the purchase of 5 hens (or pullets as they call them before a year old)...

     Well, maybe it started a bit before that...

     A friend of ours was moving to Chicago and getting ready to sell her house. Her neighbor was short selling their house, so we went for a look. Turns out, she wasn't actually approved for a shortsale quite yet, but the damage was done, we now had the house buying bug, so we kept looking. Shortsales and foreclosures. We looked, we bid, we lost, rinse, and repeat. 
   Then it happened.  We found a foreclosure with around 20 acres (10 pasture, 10 wooded, and a horse barn) at a great price...too good to be true? Sure enough, the realtors didn't check their facts. As I dug into deed books, I discovered that the lot had been split into two. The house was on a small flag shaped lot, and the pasture and woods around it were already sold. Disappointment again, but the seed of having a farm was planted in my brain. From that point forward, we only looked at farm property. If it has more than 10 acres and in our price range and in Forsyth county (Georgia), the house was a dump. If the house was nice, it was outside of the county, and Dylan would have to switch schools---to a high schooler, this would be devastating, so we kept looking.

     Eventually, we found 12 acres (foreclosure) for sale, but it was just a lot--no house. The price was a bit more than we wanted to spend, but pretty cheap per acre compared to what was on the market. The downside was that there was no house, and it was fully wooded. Being fully wooded would not have been bad, had we not wanted some pasture land (for chickens, turkeys, cows, goats, etc...).   Well, not having ever cleared land or created a pasture (outside of seeding my lawn), I figured it couldn't be that hard. So, we bought the land, although everyone wasn't exactly on board just yet.  My wife, Cindy, had expressed reservations.   She was a bit out of her comfort zone, and thought we might eventually find what we were looking for, if we just waited.   She was probably right, but I'm a Taurus, and a bit stubborn, as bulls can be.  I figured it would be good for everyone to learn a bit more about where their food comes from and to build something from the ground up.   More on that later.  Back to the chickens.

     Our son, Dylan, really got the farm bug. He'd already raised Bearded Dragons, which he fully paid for himself, but now he wanted to raise some chickens to supply us with eggs. We were a bit reluctant to start this at our current house, but after checking our HOA covenants and not finding anything prohibiting chickens (as long as the pets weren't deemed "noxious"), we agreed to let him get some chickens. We picked them up from the local feed and seed store on March 21, 2010.

     While the chicks were nice and toasty inside the basement in the Rubbermaid storage box, Dylan started working on their coop.

    

   The coop was made out of an old, kids' play-cabin with a framed "run" attached to it. He built it by himself, with minor guidance on things like how to attach a door to a plastic cabin, keeping the "run" from falling over, attaching a roost to the cabin, etc...).   No chicken wire on yet, just framed out with drainage ditches dug.

 The chicks grew fast. At almost one month old, they were already starting to look like real, albeit skinny, chickens.

     Dylan and his friend, Leland, named the hens gender appropriate names, such as Bob, George, Tyson, Lady, and Rex. Okay, so not gender appropriate, but names none-the-less.

• Tyson is a Buff Orpington (lays light brown eggs),

• Lady a Silverlaced Wyandotte (lays speckled, brown eggs),

• Rex a Wheaten Ameraucana (aka "Easter Egger", because it lays colored eggs),

• Bob and George are Rhode Island Reds (medium brown eggs).

On August 12, 2010, we got our first eggs. It was pretty exciting.  They came from the Rhode Island Reds, which are very reliable egg layers.  The first ones were a little small, which is expected, but now they are about the size of the large eggs you buy at the grocery store.  The difference is, we know exactly when these eggs were laid.