About a year ago, I decided to knock something off of my bucket list. I’ve always wanted my own flock of hens. Primarily because I wanted fresh, nutritious eggs to feed myself and my family with. And because I love watching the hens. They are so entertaining. They chase down insects with a vengeance. Their squawking and squabbling is humorous. And there are so many different breeds. I created my own little rainbow, made up entirely of chickens. Here are my girls:

The boys and I loved the entire process of raising our chicks to hens when we first decided to go into the chicken business. Dustin sweetly built my hens a neat coop and a chicken run. They even have access to our grass pastures through a tunnel that I built them. The best part of having these girls is that I get to reap the rewards of our labor as I gather their eggs daily. Since the project has been so enjoyable to us, we recently decided that we’d add some more hens to our flock this summer. Here’s how we did it:

First, I ordered baby chicks from an excellent hatchery that I’ve used in the past. Our baby chicks were hatched out in Missouri at 5am on a Monday morning. Did you know that baby chicks are sent through the mail? The postal service has been doing it for years and years. The chicks arrived at our local post office and we picked them up when they were about 48 hours old. They all arrived safe and sound!

We brought them home and carefully placed them in our brooder, which contains water, feed, fresh pine bedding and a lovely pair of heat lamps.

They will stay in there for several weeks, until they are large enough to safely venture into an outdoor pen. We have been happily watching them grow!

Hopefully in a few weeks we can add them to our fleet of hens! You can’t have too many chickens, right?!?