Welcome

This is a blog devoted to documenting the growth of our backyard chicken flock and ourselves in the process. We live just outside New Orleans on the Orleans/Jefferson Parish line. We have a small house with a decent sized yard and a garden that is every increasing in size. We both like the idea of living a more sustainable lifestyle and leaving less of a footprint on the world around us, one step at a time. 

Brandon grew up around chickens. His grandparents had them as well as many other animals and he got to enjoy the many benefits of helping raise poultry. Unfortunately, I did not. My friend Ellie mentioned that she had an urban chicken ranch in the lower garden district of New Orleans and a new idea came to life. We discussed the idea over a couple of weeks and decided that we would like to have our own small flock to raise and enjoy. Who doesn't want a pet that can make them breakfast? 

Brandon is a chef and makes the most wonderful dishes as well as gourmet quiche. I can only imagine how good it will be once we partake in the fruits of our labor. 

We both did a lot of research before we jumped in to buying our first chickens. We are fortunate that we live in Jefferson Parish because the ordinances regarding livestock in residential areas currently has no limit on the number of birds we can have in our flock as long as they are treated humanely and they live in a coop, house or run. One street over in Orleans parish, they have a strict law allowing maximum of 5 birds in a residential setting. 

Now that we knew how many birds we could have, we did more research to find out what breed of chickens we wanted to raise. We were fairly inexperienced with the wide variety of birds that were available and to the differences between them as well. What we did know is that we wanted a medium size bird that lays good size eggs, is heat tolerant and is a fairly docile bird to raise. Chickens that were easy on the eyes wouldn't be too bad either. With that in mind, we looked through many breeds and decided on a few that we liked: Buff Orpingtons, Americaunas or Easter Eggers, Rhode Island Reds and Brown Leghorns. We both really liked the idea of having Easter Eggers for their multi-colored eggs. Easter Eggers will lay blue, green, brown or pink eggs; each hen will only lay one color of egg and that just sounded awesome!

Since we both wanted the Easter Eggers, we looked into hatcheries that carried our specific breed and would also have a smaller minimum of chicks to be shipped. Chicks need other chicks around for security but they also provide another essential function, they keep each other warm. Most hatcheries have a 15-25 chick minimum, and since we wanted to stay small, we opted to have 8 shipped and to give two of them to our friend. 

One major consideration when buying chicken is age of the bird and gender. Generally you are able to buy pullets, cockerels or straight run chickens. Pullets are hens and cockerels are roosters. If you go with straight run chicks, you may get pullets, cockerels or both because they are not sexed before you purchase them. It is very hard to tell pullets from cockerels when they are day old chicks and even with a lot of experience in telling them apart, you could order females and end up with a male in the batch. 

We ended up finding Carter Legacy Farms a few states away in Loxley, AL and ordered our first 8 Ameraucana/Easter Egger chicks. Scott was my contact at Legacy Farms and he was friendly and knowledgeable. Our chicks are so healthy and active. If we order more chicks in the future, Legacy Farms would be the first place to start the search for new chicks. Chicks are shipped at one day old because there is only enough yolk in the chicks' system to keep them nourished for approximately 72 hours, so this is the window that chicks are generally shipped. Our little peepers were hatched on May 14, 2012 and arrived to us at a very early 7am on May 15, 2012. We had to go to the post office to pick them up and we were so excited! We arrived at the post office, rang the doorbell and told the woman that we were here to pick up the chicks. She said" Oh the nuggets? No, we ate them". She disappeared behind the door and I could hear nothing except chicks peeping away. She brought us a cardboard box with holes cut in the sides and a chorus of cheeps. 

This is the first viable photo with the box of peepers at the post office.

Nearly headless Jillian and nearly headless Brandon with chicks.
Do not let your mail carrier take photos of you and your new additions.

 We had decided beforehand on a few names that we would like for our chickens: Ira Bea (after Brandon's grandmother) Irene (after my grandfather's childhood chicken that he marked with lipstick  to identify her) Coq au Vanessa (after chicken cooked in wine) Sweet Pea (just because) Lucy (after Lucille Ball and because she has red fluff)and finally Scallop (because our friend Nick was going to name his child Scallop if we didn't intervene). The other two do not have names because they are going to new homes when they are a little bit older. 

7 of 8 peepers in their shipping box

Since the chicks will be growing so rapidly, we will be updating every few days.