Chicks move to the farm!

Dear Family and Friends,

​Today, a Big Day arrived!  Those little tiny Easter Egger chicks that came out of their eggs in our house not so long ago: they were moving to the farm.  In the back of our janky 2005 Toyota Matrix.  In boxes (with burlap on top for breathing!).  ROAD TRIP!  Yeah baby!

For many weeks, Charlotte and I, with some help from Mark, Josephine, and Charlotte's friend Robin, worked very hard to build a very gigantic version of our backyard coop, so we can house up to 100 chickens, feed them food scraps, have them make lovely compost for us, and let them get up and go to bed when they please (meaning we don't put them in a separate coop where we - people - have to put them to bed in the evening and get them out of in the morning).   In a next letter we should describe some of that building process, which had many interesting moments...

While we were building, our Easter-Egger chicks incubated in their eggs at the end of our second story hallway (next to Charlotte's bedroom); then spent four weeks in the attic guest room; then moved to the garden shed (which we described for the Marans).   Chicks grow very fast, and if you don't give them lots of space right away, it is hard to keep up with giving them enough room.  By this week, the shed - which had looked so spacious just three weeks ago - felt incredibly cramped and was getting smelly (a big no-no for me as far as raising chickens goes, we do not like stinky chicken coops!!).   So I felt we really had to get them out of there.

Were we ready?  Kinda sorta  Yes, with a final push of effort, we did mostly finish Chicken Palace last week. We do not have a great source to fill the waterer with; no food scrap collection; no deep litter on the ground; no electrified protection fence for the chicken feed.  Nor do we have someone to look after them should we want to leave the farm for a few days (we do still live in Needham after all) - oh wait, last minute News Brief: our lovely neighbor Abby has agreed to do part-time chick-care in exchange for one year of 1-2 dozen fresh eggs weekly.   Sigh of relief!  

​But, whether we were ready or not, the chicks had to go.    

So, yesterday I got in the Matrix and headed first to Clover HIll Farm to pick up 1000 pounds of chick feed, then to Needham.  Josephine and I put together moving boxes.  We got them from Fedex so the chicks could move incognito, as we don't want the chicken police of Needham to find out we were housing almost 50 chickens in our back yard.  At first we poked air holes in them, but then we decided to leave the top open and tape burlap over it.   Next morning, we caught them all and put them in the boxes.  Chickens are very fast and very wiggly when you hold them, but there is a knack to it so sometimes it's really easy.  Will take practice.  Then, I drove back to the farm with a car full of peep peep PEEP PEEP (that was a bump or a curve).   Josephine followed behind in our lovely new EV Bolt.

Around lunch time, we introduced them to their new home!  They were instantly enamored!   Love the wild weedy corners and the branches we put over the roosts for visual interest and cozy protection.   It is so much fun watching happy chickens!   I don't know what it is exactly.  Is it a certain tone of peep-peep?  Or a way they fluff their feathers?  Or the way they move around in little clusters from here to there?   Yeah!!! 

​Tot ziens en groetjes!   Babette