The Snow Birds

It's late February, and here in the Northern latitudes, it's pretty easy to get a little bit of cabin fever. We're at least a month away from being able to do any real work in the dirt, and looking through seed catalogs only gets you so far. Well, it's no different for our chickens, who have been literally "cooped up" since the winter arrived. You can see in this view out toward our backyard that it's hardly chicken-friendly weather.

Of course, the coop, where the chickens spend the night, is well insulated and protected from the elements. We keep it stocked with fresh pine shaving bedding, and try not to open the doors any more than necessary, to keep the wind and moisture out. In theory that should be enough to sustain our hens, but it gets pretty darn cold in Iowa (sometimes below zero overnight). So we opted to add a little more heat in the form of an infrared heat lamp. The light provides heat, while the red keeps it from being too bright and keeping the chickens awake at night.

That takes care of the coop, but the chickens really only spend the night inside there. Most of the day they wander about the run, eating, drinking, pecking and scratching. And our run is constructed of wire mesh, which would let all the snow and wind through. That's a big danger for chickens, since it can cause frostbite. As a result, we've had to create a windblock about the entire run. This we cobbled together from whatever we had on hand, including cardboard, plywood, and used feed bags (which work great). We also covered the top of the run with clear plastic sheeting to keep out the snow yet let in some sunlight.

This setup keeps the chickens safe and protected from the elements, but the downside is that it also makes things pretty boring for them. During the summer they're accustomed to seeing the yard outside the run, munching on bugs that wander in, and also snacking on weeds and scraps that we throw in to them. Most of those are gone during the winter, so we try to provide some interesting enrichment inside the run. This way, even if they have to be inside, at least things aren't too monotonous. This picture shows them crowding around a hanging cabbage - good for extra nutrients, and some excitement as it swings around in response to their pecks. It's just like chicken tetherball!

You'll also notice that the last two pictures have a wall or two of the chicken run uncovered. We do this periodically on nice days during the winter to let a little fresh air in and to let the chickens enjoy some scenery. Days like this are somewhat rare during an Iowa winter, but when it's relatively warm and calm, it's nice to take advantage of it. In the future we're hoping to build a larger fenced area that can be utilized on nice days for some supervised "free-ranging." After all, our chickens can get by while being cooped up, but we do what we can to relieve their cabin fever too!

Growing a Better Lunch

One of the things they don't warn you about being a grown-up is that you have to make your own lunches. Seriously. Like, either the night before (and who plans that far ahead?) or else early in the morning before work, as you're trying to get your sleepy self dressed and out the door in some sort of societally-accepted state. It's kind of a bummer, and makes us yearn back for the simpler days of being in school, when a brown paper bag would just be ready and waiting in the morning, full of delicious goodies for us to eat at lunchtime. Those days are sadly no more.

So, what's a grown person to do? Well, you can go out to eat, but that gets expensive and likely unhealthy in a hurry. Or you can just deal with the annoyance of having to make your own lunch, and try to offset that by making it as good a lunch as you can. We've certainly come a long way in that regard. It wasn't that long ago that we were packing baloney sandwiches with american cheese on white bread for some of our first working lunches. We gradually transitioned to higher quality lunchmeat on whole grain bread, but even that wasn't ideal. Deli meat is pricey, processed and loaded with sodium, and even eating grains is suspect now if you believe in all these low-glycemic index diets. We tend to have more of an "everything-in-moderation" philosophy, but even so we knew we wanted a change.

Lunch needs to have a protein source, so we started there. What sort of cheap, readily available, healthy protein do we have at our disposal at any time? It's hard to recall exactly, but maybe these gals can help us remember (gratuitous chicken photos!).

Of course, eggs! Our backyard chicken flock provides us with more than enough eggs to each eat one or two a day. The manner in which to serve the eggs was a little less clear though. There's egg salad sandwiches, which are amazing, and which we honestly haven't made enough of. But for the days when we weren't doing that, we decided to make chef salads of sorts, with hard boiled eggs and whatever veggies we had from the garden atop mixed greens. That's a tasty start to a lunch.

Only one problem. Many would argue that salad greens are healthier than deli meat, but honestly, they're not much cheaper. We use about a pound of either one per week, and if we buy what we think to be the higher-quality versions (as close as we can tell), that's still $6 or $7 in what amounts to pretty basic ingredients. Not a really big amount of money, but it adds up over the course of the year, and the greens are certainly not local at this time of year. So we started to think about ways to get salad greens more cheaply and locally. Being farmers, we would certainly grow them ourselves, if only it weren't fall/winter and getting so cold. We egregiously mistimed planting our fall garden, so we're out of luck. Or are we...

As you can see, we've already got a growlight on in the house, attempting to start some columbines (flowers, not even edible!) for a planter bed next spring, but they only take up the left half of the light. The right side was literally shining on nothing. The cats seem to enjoy laying under it, but that doesn't really do us a lot of good. So we ran to the local nursery and picked up a packet of mixed salad green seeds. We already have lots of spinach seeds which we also intend to plant. The goal, or the experiment here, is to try to not only start lettuce indoors, but to actually grow it to a full enough size that we can harvest it and use it to make our lunches. It's not terribly crazy - others online have done the same thing. But it's new for us and we're excited to give it a try.

It's possible this won't work very well, or that it won't save us much money compared to storebought greens. But we're farmers, darn it, and it just feels wrong not to be growing anything! We'll keep you informed as to how this is going, as we try to build a sack lunch that gets closer and closer to being truly "homemade."

The Chickens (and the Eggs!)

Although we're fortunate enough to have plenty of excitement and unpredictability in our lives, many days here on the urban farm fall into a comfortable, familiar routine. We go to our day jobs, spend 8 or more hours doing whatever it is that engineers do, come home, gather fresh eggs, and prepare dinner. Oh, wait... That may be our routine these days, but of course the egg part is sort of new, not to mention unusual for city dwellers like us. Our chickens are just so easygoing and low-maintenance that they've become part of our new normal with hardly a second thought.

Part of that may be because we see them every day, but it's been a little while since we've shared any chicken news here on the blog. As you can see in the picture, they've continued to get bigger, and the coloration of some (particularly the Easter Eggers) has changed slightly. But they're still very much the same in temperament. They like to beg for and devour pretty much anything we give them, from the storebought chicken treats to old kitchen scraps to the bugs we want to get out of the garden. And they loved scratching and pecking at the fresh grass in the photo, from the chicken run addition we put on a few weeks ago.

As fun as the chickens are to watch, we got them for a more practical reason: eggs! And in that area they sure haven't disappointed. From the mention last month of our first egg, production has steadily ramped up to the point where we now expect 6 to 8 eggs to be laid each day. Some days every single hen lays an egg and we have nine! From day one to today, we've gathered a whopping 286 eggs.

Now, we both like eggs, but that's a heck of a lot for us to eat. In addition to giving them to neighbors and friends, we've found that keeping a stash of hard-boiled eggs helps use them up. A quick breakfast when we're running late, or chopped up on a salad for lunch, it's just a great thing to have around. But hard boiling farm fresh eggs is more difficult than you might think. You see, we're trying to boil our eggs within days of harvest, whereas a grocery store egg has sat for a few weeks before it even gets to you. This allows some separation to occur between the shell and the membrane inside, so the peeling process goes better.

A really fresh egg doesn't have that gap, so when it comes time to peel after boiling, the shell sticks to the outside of the egg white, and you end up tearing up a lot of egg trying to get the shell off. So, what to do? The secret is to help create that separation yourself. That way you can enjoy fresh eggs without the frustration of a "bad peeler." Here's how we do it.

Use an ordinary pushpin, and poke a hole into the fat end (not the pointy end) of each egg you want to hard boil. This is the scariest step, because the first time you'll feel sure that you're going to shatter the egg. At least, we did. But if you keep up gentle pressure, possibly while rotating the pin back and forth a bit, you'll end up punching just through the shell and not through the membrane. Another reason to like pushpins for this step is that you can usually just push down all the way to the hilt of the pin, and the hole ends up being that proper depth. Sometimes it may push just into the white, but that's actually okay too.

Here's what a half-dozen prepared eggs looks like. You may have to look pretty closely, but you can see the tiny pinhole in each one. Now they're ready to boil! Everyone seems to have a slightly different method for doing this, but here's ours: Bring a pot of water to a boil, place the eggs in using a slotted spoon, bring the water back up to a boil if the eggs have cooled it, then cover the pot and let it sit for 15 minutes. There's actually enough heat in the water at that point to perfectly cook the eggs, and you don't have to keep using gas or electricity to heat it any further.

We mentioned that it's possible the pushpin will poke into the egg white in some instances. Well, again, that's nothing to worry about. You'll just notice a thin ribbon of white stream out of the hole for a bit, then it will separate off and float around in the pot. That small portion of egg is lost, but it's really an insignificant amount, and once it separates away, that should be all of it. The peeled egg may have a small depression in that area, but it's truly worth the risk because...

The eggs will peel perfectly! Here's a batch of ours, following the procedure we just went over. Each one was an absolute dream to peel, especially after the struggles we've had before we discovered this method. We've been happy for a long time to be gathering fresh eggs from our backyard chickens, but it makes it even more rewarding when we can enjoy them that much easier. We've seen a lot of so-called "guaranteed" methods to hard boil eggs, but this is the only one that's worked consistently for us. Give it a try next time you've got some fresh, local eggs, and enjoy!

Egg-cellent News!

About 18 weeks ago, we told you all about the new baby chicks that we were raising on our urban farm.  We gave each fuzzy little bird a name, fed them, and kept them warm.  Then we talked about how fast they were growing up and we moved them out into the coop we built in the backyard.  And now today we are very proud to share our latest milestone in chicken keeping.

We've been keeping a close eye on the chicken coop lately; checking the next boxes and glancing around the outdoor run.  And today we finally found what we've been looking for - our first egg!  

This little egg is a bit smaller than an average hen's egg.  That is common for young chickens and it shouldn't be much longer until we're getting full sized eggs from each one of our birds.  We didn't actually find this egg in the nest boxes either.  Evidently one of chickens decided she'd rather lay her egg outdoors.  When Greg spotted the egg, we were pretty sure that it hadn't been there long, but admittedly, we had been checking the next boxes more thoroughly than the rest of the coop.  So we thought we'd better make sure that the egg was fresh.

An easy test to check the freshness of an egg is to simply place it in a glass filled with water.  Our egg sank to the bottom of the glass and sat on its side.  That means that it's very fresh and we can feel confident about eating it safely.

To help you see that our egg is a little on the small side, we placed it inside the carton of local eggs that we recently bought at the grocery store.  Can you see which one is ours?

We aren't sure which one of our chickens actually laid the first egg.  It wasn't one of our Easter Eggers, because they lay blue eggs.  But our Plymouth Barred Rocks, Buff Orpingtons, and Rhode Island Reds will all lay brown eggs, so it could have been any one of them.  Whichever it was, we do hope that she starts giving lessons to the rest of the flock!

Edited to add:  After a couple of days observing the flock, we think the chicken that laid our first egg is the Rhode Island Red that you can see standing behind the water jug in the last photo.

This post has been shared with Simple Lives Thursday.

July Harvest Update

If it feels like it's been a really long time since we've posted, trust us, we feel the same. We've both been on the road a lot lately for our (non-farming) day jobs; Greg was in Atlanta last week, with Stacia in Dallas right now. That makes it hard to keep up with even maintaining and caring for our garden, much less finding time to blog about it. So here's a brief (and overdue) update on our fruitful July harvest, after which we should be back to our regular posting schedule.

As we mentioned last time, it seems that we have all the zucchini plant pests you possibly can. But those plants are real troopers, and just keep churning out zucchini after zucchini. We've been pretty diligent in harvesting them before they reach baseball bat-size, but it's still a heck of a lot of zucchini. This shows just the amount we happened to have on hand this evening, not counting the many we've already eaten or the three that are almost ready to pick. Considering the duress they're under, these are some pretty incredible plants!

Not surprsingly, zucchini lead the way in the harvest totals. Overall, in July we harvested:

0.4 ounces of snow peas
0.7 ounces of Poblano peppers
1.1 ounces of Roma tomatoes
9.8 ounces of Anaheim peppers
12.2 ounces of strawberries
12.3 ounces of kale
12.7 ounces of cherry tomatoes (52 tomatoes)
13.9 ounces of green beans
1 pound 13.1 ounces of garlic

And... 11 pounds 12.5 ounces of zucchini (8 zukes)!

Unfortunately, while the zucchini haven't seemed to show any sign of slowing under the attack of the various bugs, the same can't be said for our tomatoes. We've had a lot of the fruits split, most likely due to uneven watering with the intense drought we've been having this year. Well, the cucumber beetles have been using those soft spots as entry points into the tomatoes and just wreaking havoc. They don't all look this bad, but we do have our share of tomatoes that end up looking tunneled through and chewed up like this.

We should probably keep a better eye on watering so they don't split so bad to begin with, but for now it's been necessary to cut out the good bits to keep around the damage. They taste great, but it would be nice if they didn't look so terrible.

And of course, we still have chickens, and have probably been criminally negligent in not posting photos of them. The ladies still haven't laid any eggs, but according to what we read online and in books, we're very very close to that happening. Most likely within another couple of weeks we should have our first egg. Other than that, they're doing well - they may not enjoy the heat we've had but they've been dealing with it very well. And how's this for a fun chicken discovery: they seem to love the taste of Japanese beetles! Thankfully we don't have very many of those around the garden but when we find one, we pluck it off and give our hens a snack. With tastes like that, who wouldn't want backyard chickens?

May Harvest Update

As we were scurrying about this morning getting ready to leave for our day jobs (not farming), Greg glanced out the back window and was greeted with this view. Our garden always seems bucolic and peaceful, but on this crisp morning it just looked so nice we had to stop out and visit for a few minutes.

Most of the plants - those that haven't been attacked too badly by our neighborhood rabbits - looked very good. Our broccoli is starting to form heads, which is a really encouraging sign. Two years running we've lost our entire broccoli crop either to bolting or to animals, so we're excited about any possible harvest. We haven't gotten any yet, but we're hopeful.

The one area where we have been harvesting quite a bit is our greens and radish box. This box was planted with 1/3 spinach, 1/3 radishes, and 1/3 various lettuces. By now all the radishes have been pulled, but the others are still going strong. From the start of the season up to the end of May, we've harvested:

 - 70 radishes, each about 0.6 ounces, for a total of 2 lb 10 ounces
 - As many radish greens as we cared to eat; the rest went to compost
 - 5 ounces of garlic scapes, the flavorful shoots that appear in the spring
 - 1 lb, 10 ounces of baby leaf spinach
 - No significant lettuce or mache

Now, you can see there is plentiful lettuce growing here, but we've chosen so far not to harvest it. Based on a few nibbles here and there, we've discovered that our leaf lettuces are incredibly bitter! Some quick internet research seems to indicate that it's either soil nutrient deficiencies or inconsistent watering, but we're just not sure yet. Any experience our readers have in growing lettuce that isn't spit-it-out bitter would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and our chickens haven't produced a thing for us yet, but they are still really cute and fun to play with. They love to eat the plentiful clover that grows in our yard, and they trust us now enough to eat it right out of our hands.

All told it's not a ton of food just yet, but we can see that a lot of plants are getting close to harvest stage. The broccoli we mentioned, as well as kale and snap peas, should be ripe within a week or two. Plus we've been eating spinach and radishes in almost every home-cooked meal this month, from salads and sandwiches to spinach pizzas and oven-roasted radishes. They taste great, we know they've been naturally grown, and we eat them fresh-picked straight from the earth.

How's your garden looking so far this year? Hopefully it's been a bountiful harvest all around and it continues into the rest of the gardening season.

Home Tweet Home

As our chickens have been growing quickly over the past few weeks, so has their backyard home. We showed you the original concept for the chicken coop several posts ago, but now we can show you the real thing!

First we chose the spot where we wanted to place the chicken coop. We took some time to level out the soil and placed some landscaping pavers under our floor sections. Leveling the soil helps the rest of the coop stand up straight, and the pavers should keep the wood from being in direct contact with the soil, which would cause it to rot.

The wall pieces were actually assembled in our basement over the winter, so that step went pretty quickly.  We just laid out the walls, stood them up, and fastened them together. We're glad we took the time to build these last winter, because it was a big time-saver during construction.

After the walls were standing, we raised the roof! Both literally and figuratively. This step was a little tricky just because the roof was a large, heavy piece that we needed to lift 8 feet off the ground. That required two people, each with their own ladder, to lift the roof and climb the ladders in synchronization.

Things really started to look like a chicken coop after we attached the sheathing, windows, and door. That's the same charming, used door that we picked up at the ReStore several months ago. It looked much better after a fresh coat of paint. The sheathing is just several sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) that we cut to the proper size for each wall.  We installed the windows backwards, so that we can open them from the outside. This allows us to get some air flow through the coop to provide ventilation and keep the temperature down in the summer.

It's important to keep the chicken coop dry, so we took lots of care to seal up the roof using roofing caulk. We even laid down tar paper and asphalt shingles. We hadn't shingled anything before, but luckily the internet can teach you to do anything! This handy YouTube video was a great resource for us. The coop has been through a couple of rain storms already and we haven't seen any signs of a leak.

It required a lot of discussion at the hardware store, but we finally settled on the perfect shade of blue to paint the outside walls of the coop. The color pairs nicely with our bright compost bin, and has just the right amount of country charm with a little seaside flair mixed in.

The outdoor run is covered with 1/2" hardware cloth (wire mesh) to keep the chickens in and most importantly to keep predators out. You might think that we don't have to worry about predators in our urban neighborhood, but that's not the case. Cities have lots of animals that can harm chickens, including raccoons, foxes, hawks, and domestic dogs. We haven't finished this yet, but we'll bury the hardware cloth around the perimeter of the run to keep animals from digging under it.

Now that they are fully feathered (about 4-5 weeks) the ladies (plus Frenchie) have moved out into their new home. They were a little nervous about it at first, but now they seem to be settled in nicely. As far as we can tell, they like their new coop better than their old cardboard box.

This chicken coop was a lot of work, but we are thrilled with how it's turned out. The two of us didn't really have much carpentry experience, but by taking it one step at a time, we've built an attractive coop that will keep our backyard flock healthy and safe for many years.
This post has been shared at Simple Lives Thursday.

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

You may remember our adventures in chicken-keeping began with three tiny black and white fuzzballs. They started out all looking the same.

Over time, though, they began to get some differences in coloration and eventually personality that helped us tell them apart. The two Barred Rocks in this group picture are the black chickens with white or gray markings. You can see that Liza in the foreground looks much darker than Frenchie just behind her, even though they're the same breed.

In fact, in a lot of ways, we started to think that Frenchie looked a bit, well, different.

By three weeks old, we were pretty sure we knew what it was that made Frenchie different. At this age Helga (the other Barred Rock) was still mostly black with a smattering of white speckles. She'd also developed a small comb on the front of her face.

Frenchie, on the other hand, had become almost entirely striped, with a larger comb and big thick legs.

And boy was Frenchie bigger than the other chicks!

This meant that the trouble with Frenchie was... that she was a he! Yes, we have ourselves a bona fide rooster. It turns out that determining the sex of a day-old chick is not so easy. The hatchery from which we'd gotten our chicks promises 90% accuracy, so when we ordered 10 hens we knew this was a definite possibility. There aren't always such early plumage differences between males and females, but this particular breed does begin to show differences at a young age. The size difference, the bigger comb and the thicker legs are also pretty universal indicators that it's a rooster.

Unfortunately, keeping backyard roosters is not a great idea in an urban area. Technically it wouldn't be against the chicken laws, but once a rooster starts crowing every morning (and throughout the rest of the day) the noise ordinance complaints can pile up in a hurry! We want our neighbors to like our urban chickens, so Frenchie is going to have to find a new home.

Luckily we have a little time before Frenchie gets too vocal. Right now we're following several leads, including some friends with a legitimate nice farm in the country where he could live. And we actually mean that, we're not talking about a "nice farm in the country."

This brings our flock down to a group of nine, since none of the others look very rooster-y just yet. We'll still keep a close eye on them in case there are any late bloomers, but for now we're pretty optimistic. In the meantime feel free to let us know if you know anyone who needs a rooster!

Getting Bigger Everyday

We know, we know.  We are long overdue for a chicken update.  We’ve been doing our best to keep up with our little ladies but it’s been tough.  It’s just amazing how fast they grow!

They started out in a cardboard box that was about 2½ feet by 2½ feet.  We expected that to hold them for a while, but it turns out that we vastly underestimated them.  The three Plymouth Barred Rocks, our older chicks, quickly became curious about the world that existed outside of their cardboard box.  By the time the Barred Rocks were two weeks old, Helga made a very impressive escape attempt that was only thwarted because we happened to be standing right beside the box to corral her.

So they’ve since been relocated to a much larger cardboard/duct tape Franken-box that should (hopefully) hold them for a few more weeks.  As of this post, the Rhode Island Reds (red chicks), Buff Orpingtons (yellow chicks), and Easter Eggers (grayish brown striped chicks) are two weeks old and the Plymouth Barred Rocks (black and white chicks) are almost three weeks old.

Their appearance changes every single day, as they are gradually replacing their fluffy down with real feathers.  Most of the real feathers are showing up on their wings and tails, but the Barred Rocks are beginning to get feathers on their necks and backs too.  Their feet have gotten much bigger and they are starting to develop combs on the top of their heads.

And their behavior is just hilarious!  Our chicks peck and scratch at the bottom of the box almost constantly.  Then suddenly, without any warning or reason, one of them will sprint across the box flailing and flapping her little wings.  We’ve also been seeing some power struggles.  These mostly involve two chicks stretching up tall, puffing up their chest feathers, and dancing around in circles.  They’ve pecked at eachother a little, but none of their squabbles have gotten bad enough for us to intervene.  They are just working out their social order to decide which chicken “rules the roost.”

The chicken coop is really coming along now, but we’ve still got lots to do before the chickens can move in.  The walls are all standing and we’ve just about completed the exterior sheeting.  We’ve even had a couple of neighbors ask us about it.  It’s been fun to see their reactions; which have mostly been a mixture of confusion, surprise, and amusement.

So far keeping chickens has been loads of fun.  Building the chicken coop has been lots of work, but I think we’ll be pretty happy with it when it’s finished.  We’ll try to do a better job of keeping you all posted on the happenings with our little gals in the upcoming weeks.

The Gang's All Here

We picked up the rest of the chickens today!

So, Meine Damen und Herren, Mes dames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen, we'd like to introduce you all to the now-complete Urban Farm Chicken Flock!

First off we have our trio of Buff Orpingtons; Lulu, Fritzy, and Sally.  Don't ask us which little yellow fuzzball corresponds to which name.  It's impossible to tell these three apart right now.  When they are all grown up, the Buff Orpingtons will be a pretty golden beige color.  We wanted to be sure to include them in our backyard flock, because they are known to be one of the most friendly and docile breeds.

  

Next up, are a pair of Rhode Island Reds; Rozy and Texas.  As their present coloration suggests, they'll grow up to be reddish brown adult chickens.  Rhode Island Reds are said be some of the most reliable egg layers, so we had to get a couple of them!

And we have Bobbi and Vicki. Or is it Vicki and Bobbi?  Kidding.  Unlike their namesakes, it's actually very easy to tell our Easter Eggers apart.  Bobbi, on the right, has a very prominent striping pattern, while Vicki, on the left, has more subtle stripes.  I can't say for sure how they'll look grown up, because Easter Eggers are hybrids that can have a variety of adult feather patterns.  We picked this variety because they lay light green or blue eggs.  No kidding!  We're excited to see their pretty eggs this fall.

And you've already met our Plymouth Barred Rocks.  Here you can see Frenchie sitting on the ground with Liza demonstrating how to sit on a roost.  Frenchie hasn't quite figured this out yet.  The Plymouth Barred Rocks will be black and white striped when they grow up.  They are a notoriously curious and clever breed, and everyone says they are a very entertaining addition to a backyard flock.

The Barred Rocks are actually almost one week old now.  In addition to learning to sit on the roost, they've grown bigger, and you can see on Helga's wing that they're beginning to replace the down on their wings with a row of real feathers!

If you're a fan of the musical Cabaret, you might recognize that we've named our flock after the Kit Kat Klub dancers (plus Liza Minelli of course).  You might have even caught the references to the show in this post.  If not, no worries, we'll now go back to keeping our Broadway nerdiness to ourselves. However, we will be sure to keep you up to date with the happenings in the backyard flock as all our chicks continue to get bigger, complete with lots of cute pictures!

The First of Our Flock

The chickens are here! The chickens are here! Well, some of them are anyway. As of Friday afternoon, the population of the urban farm increased by three. And the cuteness factor of the farm just skyrocketed. Because each of our new additions looks like this:

This is a Plymouth Barred Rock chick, just a few days after hatching. As you can see, she's pretty tiny, only a few inches tall. And she feels like she weighs hardly anything at all. At this age, a lot of that size is fluffy down. Chickens grow incredibly quickly though, and in a few weeks she'll start to look very different.

Even though our chicks are just a few days old, that doesn't mean we had to hatch the eggs ourselves. We purchased ours from a local feed store, which in turn bought day-old chicks from a hatchery 75 miles north of Des Moines. We wanted specific breeds, so we put in an order weeks ago, but at many feed stores you can simply walk in and buy baby chicks.

Of course, you can't just buy chicks if you don't have somewhere to put them. They aren't terribly high maintenance, but there are a few things they require. The basics are food, water and heat. Chicks eat pellets made from a blend of grains and protein, which we picked up at the feed store as well. This and the water are dispensed via gravity with some cheap containers also available at feed or farm stores. We put these in a large cardboard box with a half inch of soft pine shavings in the bottom.

Heat is provided by an infrared heat lamp. We adjusted the height of the lamp to achieve a temperature in the box of about 95 degrees. We'll change the height weekly to gradually lower the temperature as they get older, about 5 degrees per week. By the time they're okay with room temperature, we'll probably be ready to move them outside.

When we first brought these fuzzballs home, it seemed like they couldn't do much but peep. They were a bit wobbly even standing on their feet and seemed pretty scared. They needed a little help from us to find the water dish, and it took a little while before they felt like eating. In a few short days, though, they have really progressed! They're eating, drinking, sleeping and pooping, all the things a baby chick should do. And they've started to scamper around the box, giving their little legs a test drive. They've really come out of their shells, so to speak (har har), and seem really curious about their new world.

We led off by saying that some of the chickens have arrived. These three, cute as they are, make up less than half of the flock we intend to have. The feed store is getting in different breeds at different times, so it won't be until Wednesday that we have all our babies. It'll be hard to imagine having ten of these little peepers running around, but it sounds like a lot of fun, too. It's gonna be hard to wait!