Chickens....

Any of you guys have chickens? My wife wants to get a few. I know nothing about them except that I like to eat them.

They cross the street for no particular reason.

Chickens are alot of fun. I had 5 of them for years and had all the eggs I wanted.

Austin use to have a chicken forum...they are mighty tasty.

I have a bunch of neighbors with chickens a guy at work brings eggs in every day a buck a dozen he can’t eat as many as he gets. I had a friend I bought chickens off of for many years he would raise a couple hundred. He would put the poop in green trash bags and sit them in a row tied up in his field. He said when the bags were gone 100% then it was safe to put on the garden. It took several years of sitting for the bags to break down from the sun and weather and when you couldn’t see any green he would put it on his garden. His crops were amazing. I like hearing the neighbors rooster when I’m in the hot tub. I have little desire to mess around with them and she has zero (absolutely not!) she says chickens are creepy. So no chickens in my future but I like eating them also.

Have you checked out the chicken forum, I think it is a sister to this one.
http://www.chickenforum.com/f11/

We'll have to start calling you Colonel Chris, and every so often Havasu can come "visit the colonel". :beer:

Since I still admin Chicken Forum, I'll give Chris a free premium upgrade so he can talk with all the old ladies about their cycles and mean husbands!

havasu said:

Since I still admin Chicken Forum, I'll give Chris a free premium upgrade so he can talk with all the old ladies about their cycles and mean husbands!

Click to expand...

Kinda like being around here huh?

Yeah, both places are full of chicken s#!t!

You guys sure are talking me into letting her have chickens.

Only reason I am against it is because I know after week one it will be me taking care of them and after week 12 we will be having chicken dinner with crying kids wondering where their pet chickens went.

LOL. Seriously, they are alot of fun....until them damn raccoons eat through the chicken wire and decapitate all your chickens, leaving their lifeless bodies in the yard and is found by your eight year old daughter feeding them as she went out the door to go to school. At least this is my story and the end of my chicken farming days. I can still remember some of their names...Mollie, Oprah, Peepers, Dollie and Queenie, and I can't forget our two quails, Dan and Marilyn Quayle.

Two rules if you have kids
1 every chicken is the same colour.
2 call them all one name. ours were all bitty and the ducks were duke
The only time we had a problem with kids was when my brother ran over duke with my niece in the car

Now you tell me! :hide:

I got some bitties through the 4H program when I was a kid. Raised over 50 chickens. Started them out in a brooder box in the house then moved them to a custom-built brooder box in the barn. We had to make sure it was sealed well to keep out the damn chicken snakes. The original brooder box wasn't secure enough and one day I went to feed some chicks and there was a fat chicken snake with a bunch of lumps in it stuck inside the box. It got beheaded rather quickly.

I wish I could remember what type of chickens I raised. I think they were called "fryers" but I'll have to see if my sister remembers. The main rooster got to be 22lbs and in his old age he got too fat to walk anymore. My sister got a blue ribbon for him at the 4H fair. In his prime he was an aggressive critter. Roosters HATE the color red. They particularly hate it if you wear red leotards and shake your butt at them while chanting "nya nya nya nya nya." Foghorn would charge and leap into the air to attack so we did that and we had to use trash can lids as shields. When red wasn't involved, ole Foggy liked to be held and petted. He also liked to chase the ducklings which angered the geese. I remember one day a goose grabbed him by the neck, dragged him into the pond, and was dunking his head under the water until I rescued him. Poor thing never fully recovered from that.

For the most part, my chickens were pretty docile. They like to jump up and they can halfway fly, so you need a tall enclosure with chickenwire across the top (to keep chickens in and predators out).

My cousin had some of those fancy "silky" chickens and they used to chase her and attack her all the time. Stupid things didn't even lay decent sized eggs. My chickens laid large eggs.

Since you have kids involved, I'd recommend having chickens for eggs rather than meat. I was just talking to a girl earlier today who raised a turkey and adored it only for it to disappear right before Thanksgiving and her mother cruelly broke the news to her that she was eating her beloved pet during dinner-- girl flipped out and threw the entire turkey on the floor so no one would be able to eat it. The mother should have kept her pie-hole shut.

If you do eat the chickens, best thing is to say the chickens moved to a bigger farm or something. Never kill them at home or anywhere the kids might accidentally see. Make it look like any chicken meat you bring in appears to come from the store. Never leave any evidence of killing and eating the chickens on texts on your phone or on social media sites that your kids might read.

It is imperative to keep the chickens contained, otherwise they get run over by cars, killed by dogs, killed by bratty kids, and they can get in to people's gardens. Some jerks across the street from my elderly friend had chickens that weren't contained and they were constantly jumping his fence and pecking the hell out of his tomatoes and other stuff.

There is a big difference in farm kids and city kids.

I love going to the County Fair and seeing a 10 year old little girl with her market swine pig she has been raising for a year and teaching to walk where she wants it with tapping a stick on its back and they trim them and scrub them for the fitting show and have cute names for them and then the last night of the class they have the meat auction. And the kids get money for their pig knowing it is going to be bacon. All farm kids know where meat comes from, and understand that’s part of farming and accept it. Most farm kids know you chop a chickens head off and that good deer meat comes from killing and gutting a deer.

If you are going to raise chickens for pets that’s fine or if you just want eggs go for it. But if you want them for meat tell your kids and make sure your wife is in on the plans the kids know up front in a few months we are going to chop their heads off and put them in the freezer.

This thing with chickens lately has been like a going back to the earth craze. It all sounds good until the time comes for the harvest. If your wife wants chickens make sure she also won’t have any trouble lopping off the head and hanging them over the compost bin to bleed out.

We are a family that hunts, fishes and the like. the majority of red meat we eat is deer that I have killed, cleaned and prepped. I hunt pig, deer and bird and we eat everything. I have no issue with chopping heads and cleaning animals. I have entertained the idea of a cow for food. My wife is all for it but she won't do the killing or cleaning. I am working my oldest daughter into it, she is three now and she knows I go hunting and tells me to get a deer but I don't think she really grasps it yet. She will though, I will not raise anyone that has to depend on a grocery store to survive. I would be ok with having farm animals but I don't want the responsibility of taking care of them at this point in my life, it's hard enough running a business. As for my property I am not worried about that, I live in a rural area with plenty of land and only a couple people live near by.

Her family ran a dairy farm for many years and they always sold off old stock for meat and rotated cows sometimes keeping one for burger. It’s a little hard after you have been milking one for many years to have her for dinner. I told them from time to time they get a heifer they couldn’t breed and would send it to the meat market to keep that one for home. What a difference in taste. Having a couple beef cows isn’t too much work if you have the land around here and you are making hay anyway. Just pasture them all summer and toss them a round bale once in a while. Not much difference butchering a cow than a deer just bigger.

You are teaching your kids right.