Barred Rocks
After the Black Broilers, we wanted to get laying chickens. We debated waiting until spring, but we wanted eggs. So, 8/1/2018 our baby Barred Rocks arrived. Knowing these would be our “keeping” chickens generated a whole new level of excitement in the kids.
We youtubed, and figured out how to tell the two roosters apart from the fourteen hens. We talked about the probability that we would only keep one rooster (still have two, as of this writing).
We started fermenting their feed from day one, and in addition gave them weeds and grass. They grew more slowly than the meat chickens we had previously.
At three weeks old, we were able to get them outside in the tractor and coop. We carried them out one at a time.
By eight weeks old, we decided to set them up free-ranging inside the electric fencing, with the tractor open for cover and the coop available. This was too soon. We lost one of our hens to a hawk on the fourth day.
Back into “confinement”- a 80 square foot tractor moved daily to fresh grass. Sorry, chickens, but we want you alive.
At 18 weeks, our roosters were maturing and becoming a bit aggressive. We tried again. We set up our electrical fencing to give a 75×75 enclosure, and left the coop and tractor open for them.
They had been outside for a week, when, as we watched from the deck, a hawk set up watch in a tree. As we were debating whether to intervene, the hawk swooped in low. We didn’t see exactly what happened next, as the hawk landed right on the other side of the tractor from us.
We heard the challenge of a rooster crowing, and watched the hawk fly off empty-handed as quickly as it had swooped in. Our alert rooster kept all our hens alive to lay eggs another day. We love looking out at our happy chickens, roosters standing guard.
Finally, on 12/24, when the chickens were 21 weeks old, we got our first egg.