Chickens!

I suppose it's actually been about a month since we welcomed chickens into our lives.  We have four new ladies living the good life.  Two are brown and two are white.  The white ladies were way ahead of the brown ladies in egg production but the brown gals are working on it.  We get two to three eggs a day which is just about right for us.  Though there is much temptation to get more chickens we are pretty happy with our ladies.  

Our friends Tings and Ciaran helped us to build their house.  It's actually called a chicken tractor and moves about the garden like a tractor.  So they munch up all the plants in a bed, poop in the bed and then we move them on to the next patch of whatever.  

They have a little house which contains their food and water and a place for them to roost.  As a bonus the house provides shade for the chickens at the hot times of day.  They have a 4 foot by 8 foot run which I sometimes think is a little cruel but is probably fine for them as long as they can move and check out a new area every few days. 

It's pretty great to produce your own eggs.  I wish I could give you a number on how much it cost us to build.  The house was the biggest expense so far since we really put up a lot of fencing and hardware cloth to keep out unwanted predators.  But apart from that we feed them organic feed and our table scraps and lots of bugs and weeds and we figured it works out to maybe $2 or so a dozen with our feeding schedule.  Perhaps not very efficient but lots of fun.  

Welcome ladies!