Cluck, Cluck: Part 2 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure

This look-back is meant to thoroughly introduce you to why we have chickens.  Updates of our chickens' progress can be found on our Facebook and in additional blog posts.  - The American Haggard Housewife

Whitey and Purrball surveying "lunch"

      In the meantime (see Peep, Peep: Part 1 for the beginning of our chicken-keeping tale), our chicks had arrived a day behind schedule, which was probably for the best since we hadn’t even had the chance to remove the stumps quite yet.  We had settled on seven little ones - four hens and three roosters that were being split as layers and meat birds - which were being kept in a very makeshift brooder box in the wood shed (i.e. the old chicken house turned shed mentioned in the long paragraph you probably skipped in Part 1).  The little buggers are cute, but two of our farm cats, Purrball and Whitey, appear to believe they are lunch (which only goes to show that we’re probably right in not completely free-ranging the chickens). 

      There are a couple of pointers we discovered that I just want to add for any future chicken keepers when you talk starting off with very young chicks.  We thought we had thoroughly done our homework over the course of the previous year, scanning homesteading and chicken-keeping blogs, forums and books, as well as quizzing my in-laws who had been keeping chickens for a few years already.  It just goes to show, no matter how much homework you do on the topic, you'll probably never be fully prepared because no one, and I mean no one, will have the exact same experience that you're about to have.  Therefore some of these pointers we figured out on day one, while others were things that unfortunately took awhile longer.  Hopefully some of you might also have a situation similar to ours that allows some of this advice to be helpful.  

Your brooder doesn’t have to be beautiful just practical.   (Oh, I think I just saw some veteran chicken keepers flinch!)  As you can see from the picture, ours isn’t beautiful, but it works, and that’s what really matters.  Our brooder is the base of a large dog crate (which we borrowed from a friend that probably had no idea what her dog crate was going to get into over the course of the next few weeks), three window screens (two on the top and one wired to the crate’s door), some scrap lumber (to make sure there are no holes large enough for mice to get in and eat their food), old bricks and boards (to weigh down the top screens so visiting farm cats can’t get in before we can stop them), and a lot of wire to hold it all together. So our actual brooder cost us $0 as everything was either borrowed or things we simply had lying around.  I absolutely LOVE that price as it sounds a lot better than those all-in-one brooder kits you can buy online!   

(Note: We did buy the heat lamp and bulbs, on sale, and have them to use again if needed.  So although the actual brooder didn't cost us anything, the heat did, and so did the feeders, waterers, etc. that we would need.  You'll see some of those costs later.)  

Make sure your brooder can grow with your chicks.  Those little balls of fluff will grow and fast.  I don't think we were fully prepared for just how fast a chick can grow, but if you figure they could (and this is the very earliest and not the norm) reach egg laying age by 16 weeks, they are bound to spring up fast!  By week three we realized that seven chicks in a dog crate wasn’t giving them much room, so we improvised and doubled the size of their brooder.  They still have an area with the heat lamp, but also have a whole new area to escape the full-on heat, eat and drink (think of it as old-fashioned housing: a bedroom and a common area with a range).  To make this we used the exact same design and materials as the first brooder, adding an extra screen, some more boards and the other half (i.e. top) of the dog crate (wiring both sides of the dog crate together).  It really offers the chicks a lot more room to move around and they enjoy flying from one side of the brooder to the other.  This again was a nice $0 chick-keeping cost.

Use easy-to-clean bedding for the chicks as they will make it messy and they will toss it everywhere simply because they can.  Some people use sawdust or wood shavings like you’d use in a hamster cage, others go for straw.  We skipped all of these ideas as they would have cost us a pretty penny, and went with shredded copy paper from my father’s store.  It cost us $0, saved him a trip to recycling, and since it’s not glossy, it can be added already manure-coated to our compost for the garden.  By week six we did use start using straw (which we also got for free, see Early to Bed, Early to Rise) in the enlarged brooder on the side that had the waterer they insisted on continuously spilling.  (It was much easier to clean up straw then matted newspaper, although the newspaper soaked up the water better.  So in the end it's really a tough choice as to which kept the brooder cleaner and drier.)

Don’t pay extra for the screw on bottles for chick feeders and waterers.  There’s a reason these were made as quart feeders and waterers, a quart canning jar fits them!  Concerned that the glass might break?  Don’t worry, plastic peanut butter jars and mayonnaise jars also screw on to these bases!  That means our food and waterer bases cost 50% less than they would have if we bought the whole contraption, and we recycled some of the plastic jars we had sitting around. 

Prop up your food dish… prop up your food dish… just prop it up.  I cannot stress this enough.  The chicks (a) won’t have to bend down as far and thus will eat standing instead of laying next to the feeder, and (b) most importantly have less of a chance of knocking it over and spilling the feed (i.e. wasted money at the bottom of your brooder now), which they will do, over and over and over again.  We propped up both our food and waterer on four bricks that we found in the barn. 

Introduce them to the food they will eventually be eating is something I read on one of the homesteading blogs I follow, and it made complete sense.  For those of you that plan to have chickens fed completely on commercial feed this isn’t necessary, but starting at day three we let ours try some “real food” for the first time, still giving them feed, but also giving them “chick salad mix” (scraps of lettuce, cauliflower, red and green cabbage, broccoli, carrots, celery and/or peas mixed together), pumpkin and squash, mulberries, strawberry tops, and scraps from the garden harvest for them to peck at.  We offered these to them in a sturdy (I cannot emphasize sturdy enough as they will attempt to perch on the edge and will tip it over if it's not sturdy) planter base with some fine pebbles and dirt from outside to act as grit.  (They’ll use the small stones they find in the dirt as grit to help them digest their food.)  We’d also dump in potato beetles and caterpillars picked from the garden.  This offered us pure entertainment as well, watching them chase after each other to get the beetles. 

(Note: I've noticed when you can introduce a chick to "real food" is a hot button issue in the chicken-keeping world.  We used the theory that most free-ranging mother hens by the first week would have their chicks out free-ranging too, so why not treat them like a mother hen would?  We made sure to begin with "real food" that was very finely grated or chopped to allow them to get smaller pieces.  They still have broccoli on their list of favorites, along with shredded red cabbage, and now peach peels.)  

Check for Pasty Butt.  I absolutely hated this part as (1) I have a very weak stomach and (2) picking up those chicks scared me (and now chickens do).  You'll probably come to find that I'm not a massive animal lover here, although our top priority is to not mistreat our food sources whether they be animal or land and raise the layers and meat birds humanely and happily.  I have my moments with this whole love of animals (and my farm cats), and a husband that I got to explain pasty butt to and nightly he picked up the chicks to check. We didn't have a big problem with it except in the first week after they were shipped, and it could have simply been the stress of putting them through the mail and their new environment that caused it.  

Pasty butt is essentially where poop builds up and clogs their vent, and unless it is removed, it can be fatal.  (If you'd like to see pictures of it, google "pasty butt," and I'm sorry, but I'd like to keep my breakfast down so you'll have to rely on google.)  I've noticed, just like everything in chicken-keeping, everyone has their own way of taking care of it, so look around and do what you think will work best for you.  For us, we used a wet (and very old) wash cloth (with warm water!) and cleaned the vent until it became unclogged and then dried the bird off.  (And also, sanitized the heck out of that wash cloth with a load of cat towels, ensuring it would never touch one of our faces.)  We also noticed, if one particular bird got it, it was likely to also get it again, so always be sure to check that bird.  

Entertain them.  It’s like a two-year-old child; chicks need to be entertained too.  Not only did potato beetles and caterpillars do the trick, so did adding a bundle of fresh mint to the center of the brooder.  Hanging it from one of the screens did help to freshen the place up a bit and it also acted as a chick piñata.  Each morning I put one up, by the evening it would be down, the chicks somehow managing to figure out how to untie it or peck it to death.  (They also apparently will eat the fresh mint as well.)  

The chicks checking out their new roost.

Give them something to roost on.  (A thank you to my father-in-law for this idea)  Following his father's lead (as my father-in-law did it for their chicks), my husband made a roosting bar for the chicks to roost on near the heat lamp out of some scrap lumber he had lying around.  It's a simple design.  Take an approximately 18" piece of a 1x2 and with two screws, screw the 4" pieces of 2x2s or 2x3s to the bottom to form a bar.  The chickens want to roost, so why not give them something to roost on other than the tops of the waterer and feeder (which will constantly have to be cleaned out)?  

Be prepared.  I feel like such a Boy Scout for saying this, but it really is true.  You need to be prepared for just about anything and everything.  I was completely unprepared the first day one of them decided to fly out of the brooder when I popped the screen open to change their feed.  I was even more unprepared on exactly how I was going to get the chick back into the brooder without allowing the other six to escape.  I was unprepared for them to peck at me as I changed their water, and equally unprepared that I should check their water more frequently as they grew older (not because they drank more, but because their “chicken chase” games would knock over the waterer more often, leaving them without water to drink).

    To say the least, the chicks in the brooder were certainly keeping us on our toes, and by week six even our largest rooster was getting mighty eager to greet us each time we opened the door to the shed (with a very weak cock-a-doodle-doo reminiscent of a teenage boy's voice beginning to break).   They were also just as eager to escape the confined brooder (generally by flying at you) and find some more spacious accommodations.  Fortunately, the chicken coop was just about ready for that very thing, and we were more than ready to move them into their new accommodations. 

NOW AVAILABLE!  The Golden Egg: Part 3 of Our Chicken Keeping Adventure