The Latest Additions

I have a whole list of posts that I want to write, built up over these last two weeks that I've been away from home. Instead of tackling one of those though, I thought I'd share a few pictures of the latest additions to our flock!

Monday afternoon we picked up six new, teeny-tiny little chicks. They are *unbelievably* cute!

Last year I mail-ordered our chickens, but since we were getting fewer this time around, I decided to look for a local source. It turns out that the Agway in Ithaca sells chicks each spring, and you only need a minimum order of six. Perfect! Of course, if you wanted to be certain they were fed only organic food from day one, this is not the way to go. I'm not too worried about this as we're not going to be selling ours (or their eggs), but it's something to keep in mind when picking where you're going to get your chicks.

Picking out the chicks at Agway.
All those birds made such a chirping ruckus!

You have to call ahead to have them reserve chicks for you,
but Agway does get in several varieties over the time span of about a month.
Here are the Golden Comets and the Buff Orpingtons in the cage at the store.

Because we want to be able to tell the age of our birds in order to cull them out as they get older, we decided to get some new varieties this year. We are now the proud parents of three little Barred Plymouth Rock and three Golden Comet chicks!

*Truth be told, we did have a Barred Rock last year too, but she turned out to be a he, and we ended up making soup out of him after he started beating up on his ladies!*

They are now living safe and sound in a plastic tub out in the garage. We have a heat lamp on them (this first week they like temperatures between 90° and 95° F, and we'll lower that by about five degrees a week until they're big and strong enough to be outside at ambient temperatures), and they already are eating and drinking well.

We'll need a bigger place for them soon (anyone have a huge cardboard box out there that they want to part with?) but for now they seem quite content in their modular home. The Little Bug just loves them, asking first thing each morning to go out to the garage to see the "baby bauk bauks"!!

I tried this last year and failed, but I'm going to attempt to photograph them every week to document just how quickly they grow and change! I'll post those periodically so you can follow along if you want!